Monday, 15 July 2013

Note: This is a draft version of the book which is substantively accurate but contains some typos and minor errors and a few differences from the published paper/ Kindle version.The length is about 28,000 words, so for ease of reading it may be best to copy and paste this text into a Word document, and print it out.

***

Real science – a definition

Real Sciencenoun
Science that operates on the basis of a belief in the reality of truth: that
truth is real.

Dedication

To
the late John Ziman FRS (1925-2005) physicist, and great understander of
science; who wrote about Real Science in his book of that name, and was
probably the first to distinguish real science from what nowadays calls-itself
science but is not.

Note to the reader

This
book might strike some people as bitter – it is not.

It
is however viscerally and unapologetically angry – although I hope to
have kept this reasonably well under control...

The argument of this book in a
single paragraph

Briefly,
the argument of this book is that real science is dead, and the main reason is
that professional researchers are not even trying to seek the truth and
speak the truth; and the reason for this is that professional ‘scientists’ no
longer believe in the truth - no longer believe that there is an eternal
unchanging reality beyond human wishes and organization which they have a duty
to seek and proclaim to the best of their (naturally limited) abilities. Hence
the vast structures of personnel and resources that constitute modern ‘science’
are not real science but instead merely a professional research bureaucracy,
thus fake or pseudo-science; regulated by peer review (that is, committee
opinion) rather than the search-for and service-to reality. Among the
consequences are that modern publications in the research literature must be assumed
to be worthless or misleading and should always be ignored. In practice, this
means that nearly all ‘science’ needs to be demolished (or allowed to collapse)
and real science carefully rebuilt outside the professional research structure,
from the ground up, by real scientists who regard truth-seeking as an
imperative and truthfulness as an iron law.

Introduction

As
a schoolboy and for many years afterwards, I was perhaps as idealistic about
science as anyone in recent years – it would not be much of an
exaggeration to say that I worshipped science; since I was an atheist
for whom science was the bottom-line description of reality. The great
scientists were my heroes – those whom I hoped to emulate.

For
me nothing was more fundamental than science; everything else was
properly to be evaluated from the perspective of science.

Yet
now I regard real science – the kind of science I used to worship - as a
thing of the past; an object of historical study. There are small islands of
real science dotted here and there, but with only local and dwindling
influence.

To
all extents and purposes, I see real science as dead; and what calls itself
science is a fake – worse than nothing, because it claims so much: claims
indeed the noble mantle of real science.

*

This
is not a matter of science having run-out of useful truths to discover. It is
that scientists are not any longer trying to discover useful truths.

So,
real science has essentially gone. What is now left – a vast, international
activity with millions of employed workers and multiple billions of dollars of
funding, is so thoroughly corrupt as to be un-reformable.

If
enough people care enough about real science to want it back, they will now
have to build it all over again, from the ground up.

*

This
book describes the essence of real science: a phenomenon much simpler to
describe – yet more difficult to do - than you might suspect.

It
also charts the course of real science over about a thousand years to its peak
in the three centuries up to about 1950, then its extraordinarily rapid – yet
dishonestly concealed – collapse down to almost nothing during the past two
generations.

It
is a remarkable story – covering some of the peaks of accomplishment, and some
of the darkest aspects of the human spirit.

Read
on...

Understanding science
retrospectively

The
Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk said Hegel; implying that understanding must
be retrospective. Therefore we did not know what science was, nor how it worked
(in a philosophical, historical and sociological sense), until real science was
already well-advanced towards destruction.

For me, real science is the core of the modern world. Science is the creator
and driving force of genuine economic growth (increased efficiency in the
production, trade and distribution of essentials), and a significant driver of
social change; intellectually science is the crowning glory of modernity; but
at the same time and by the same mechanisms, science is responsible for most of
the distinctive horrors of the past couple of centuries.

*

My
(very basic, to be amplified throughout this book) summary understanding of the
rise of real science was that it came from Pagan Greece (epitomized by
Aristotle), then through the early Christian theologians - epitomized by the Western
Medieval scholastic philosophers (pioneered by Peter Abelard).

It
was the Roman Catholic Church that professionalized philosophy as a subject
increasingly distinct from theology, and developed the university as
institutionally distinct from the monastery (thus dividing education from
devotion) – so, the Great Schism (when the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic
Churches divided, around 1000 AD) marked the true beginning of modernity.

Then
natural science separated from philosophy in the Renaissance era, at around the
time of Galileo, and later moved to be focused in Protestant Northern Europe
where it first became large, visible and noticeably distinct from about the
17th century.

There were agrarian and industrial revolutions in Britain during the 1700s; and
from around 1800 a new world was increasingly apparent: a world characterized
by growth in science, technology, the economy, and human capability: the world
of modernity. And from this point science became not just a distinct social
structure, but a professional career structure.

*

Since
the later 19th century, science has, with each generation, broken-up
into smaller and smaller specializations, and become more and more career
focused.

For
a while this specialization led to greater achievement, since it allowed the
devotion of more time and effort to solving more manageable problems. Yet each
new-generation specialist had been educated in a more generalist tradition –
which acted as a drag on the tendency to fragmentation and incoherence.

For
a while, therefore, specialization led to greater accomplishment within its
individual divisions yet with sufficient integration across these divisions to
maintain unity and to check error.

However,
specialization continued past this optimal point, and into less-and-less functional
fragmentation – such that science lost unity and specialisms lost the ability
to serve as mutual checks.

Science
gradually became nothing but isolated and irrefutable micro-specialisms.

Apparently,
therefore, specialization was a slippery slope for science: such that once
science had stepped-onto the slippery slope of specialization it could not
stopthe process, even when science had slid far beyond the point at
which specialization was helpful.

From real science to generic
bureaucracy

At
some point over the past several decades, science stopped being real and
evolved into its current state of being merely a research-based variant of
generic bureaucracy.

This
was increasingly clear to aware observers from the 1960s, and indeed to the
most astute observers (such as Erwin Chargaff) from several decades earlier.
But now it is so obvious that only ignorance or dishonesty prevents it being
universally acknowledged.

However, bureaucracies are systematically ignorant, and dishonesty is now
institutional and compulsory, therefore the disappearance of real science is not
acknowledged but instead vehemently denied, and steady, incremental progress is
claimed!

*

Science
presumably always was done among humans – albeit at a very low prevalence;
technological breakthroughs have tended to accumulate – albeit with
interruptions and local reversals - throughout recorded history; but modernity
happened because real scientific breakthroughs came so thick-and-fast
that increasing efficiency out-ran increasing population – and humanity escaped
what Gregory Clark has called the Malthusian Trap.

*

So
far, the thesis is relatively uncontroversial. But if modernity depends on the
take-off of real science, upon what does the take-off of real science depend?

My
answer is creative genius.

My
understanding is that real science grew fast – especially in the populations of
Northern Europe by recruiting from an increased pool of ‘creative geniuses’ who
were motivated to do science. This I regard as the essential underpinning of
modernity.

*

The
take-off of science therefore depended on two main things: 1. a sufficient
concentration of creative genius focused on scientific problems plus 2. a modest
degree of cognitive specialization.

That
is to say, smart and creative people working cooperatively on
relatively-specific ‘scientific problems’.

And
that, more or less, is my definition of science.

Merely
that.

*

So,
real science is smart and creative people working cooperatively on scientific
problems.

But
science proved so useful that it became professionalized, and initially this
seemed to accelerate progress considerably. The first few generations of
professional scientists from the later 1800s into the twentieth century were
immensely productive of significant scientific breakthroughs.

Science
seemed very obviously useful – the presumption was that even-more science would
be even-more useful...

And
so the growth of professional science continued, and continued...

Until
it out-grew the supply of creative geniuses and had to recruit from uncreative
but very smart people - but continued growing...

Until
it then out-grew the supply of uncreative but very smart people, then it had to
recruit from uncreative, only moderately smart but hard-working people – but
continued growing...

And
so on and on, until ‘science’ consisted of whomsoever who would do specific
narrow technical and managerial jobs at the wage and conditions on offer.

That’s
where we are now...

*

More
importantly, professional science initially recruited only those who regarded the
pursuit of truth as an iron law (and dishonesty was punished by expulsion
from science).

Yet,
due to professionalization, science increasingly attracted careerists
rather than truth-seekers.

*

(Truth-seekers
are typically resistant to bureaucratic organization; and bureaucratic
organization is intrinsically hostile to truth-seekers.)

*

The
professionalization of science having eliminated those who were internally-motivated
to seek truth; various formal mechanisms and procedures were introduced to try
and deal with purely careerist motivations. These mostly amount to peer review
mechanisms (peer review = the opinion of a group of senior colleagues).

So,
instead of truth-seeking, a filter of committee evaluations was applied
to ever-more-blatantly-careerist individual behaviour.

And
science continued to grow - recruiting less- and less-talented, weaker- and
weaker-motivated, less- and less honest personnel until...

...
until untalented, unmotivated and dishonest career-orientated professional scientists became a large
majority within science and included most of the most successful researchers; thus careerists took-over the peer
review evaluation procedures such as to impose their values; and ‘science’ became
nothing but a ‘professional
research bureaucracy’.

I wasn’t actually doing science

Looking
back on 25 years in professional research – I am forced to admit that, although
I certainly tried, I wasn’t actually doing science.

*

I
began professional science in 1984 - or, at least, that's what I thought I was
doing.

Since then I worked in and across a variety of fields: neuro-endocrinology
(brain transmitters and blood hormones) in relation to psychiatry; the anatomy
and physiology of the adrenal gland (especially from 1989), epidemiology
(statistics of health and disease, from about 1991); evolutionary psychology
(evolutionary aspects of human behaviour including psychiatric illness and the psycho-active
drugs, from 1994); systems theory (understanding complex biological
organization, from about 2001); and from 2003-10 I edited an international
journal of ideas publishing work from the whole of medicine – and sometimes
beyond.

*

In
all of these areas and some others I found serious problems with the
existing scientific literature: errors, inconsistencies, wrong framing of
problems.

(I
don’t mean serious problems in-my-opinion;
I mean that problems objectively, undeniably serious to any honest, informed
and competent observer prepared to think for more than five consecutive minutes
or two steps of logic – whichever comes first.)

I
was not shocked - after all, this is what science is supposedly about, most of
the time - providing the negative feedback to correct the wrong stuff.

After
all, science is not at any time-point supposed to be wholly-correct, rather it
is conceptualized as a system of intrinsic self-correction.

(Generating distinctive new lines of true and
useful scientific work is what we would all prefer to do, in other words
to be original - but only a few who are both very lucky and very able
are able to achieve this.)

*

My
assumption was that - as the years rolled by - I would have the satisfaction of
seeing the wrong things tested, discredited, discarded and replaced with
more-correct knowledge. Error would be eliminated; truth built-upon. So that
overall, and in the long term, science would progress.

That
is what was supposed to happen.

*

Well,
it hasn't happened.

It
hasn’t happened in any of the scientific fields with which I am familiar
or of which I have any knowledge. Indeed, instead, much that was true and useful
has been lost while much that is utterly worthless – dishonest, incoherent,
useless - has thriven.

A
few decades ago one could assume that published work was honest and competent (except
in specific cases); now one must assume that published work is dishonest and
incompetent (except in specific cases).

A
few decades ago one could assume that high status (“successful”) scientists
were honest and competent (except in specific cases); now one must assume that
famous and powerful scientists are dishonest and incompetent (except in
specific cases).

*

Overall
it seems that things have gone backwards, and not just slightly.

Yet
research activity (personnel, funding, publishing, communicating) have all
increased exponentially – doubling in volume every 15 or so years (doubling every
decade in medical research. And China has exploded with research
activity in the past 10 years).

So
there has been massive expansion of inputs with first stagnation then decline
of outputs. Something has gone terribly wrong: not just slightly wrong,
but terribly wrong.

*

So,
I must conclude that although I believed I was participating in
something called science, something that I thought I understood from the
writings of Jacob Bronowski and Karl Popper and from reading the great genius
scientists of the past – it turns-out that I wasn't really doing science at
all.

I was 'going through the motions' of doing science, true; but the machinery of
science was broken, and the work I was trying to do, and the work of those whom
I respected, was like a free-spinning-cog – disconnected from mainstream
activity.

If
real science is that done from truth seeking motives and communicated
truthfully, then this kind of science had zero impact on the mainstream.

Get
this – real science had become detached from professional research, technology
and policy; and (most important) detached from practice: detached from career
success, status, funding, publication, prizes and awards...

Real
science had become a thing done for subjective personal satisfaction merely
a lifestyle choice – nobody else was interested.

*

Maybe
real science was being done, maybe it was published, maybe it was cited, maybe
it was funded, maybe people made careers from doing it?

But
in the end, real science did not make any difference: real science had become just a private
hobby.

Those
few who were lucky enough to find a niche that supported real science did so by
accident, not by necessity; and the niches were shrinking all the time.

And
we who thought we were participating in the group activity of real science were
deluded – pleasantly deluded, perhaps; but deluded.

If not real science, what are
professional ‘scientists’ really doing?

The
activity of mainstream modern Big Science is most reminiscent of a Soviet Union
era organization – such as the grossly unprofitable Polish glass factory I saw
on TV being inspected by John Harvey Jones in his TV show Troubleshooter.

The
factory was producing vast quantities of defective drinking glasses which
nobody wanted. Nobody wanted to buy them nor even to use them. So the
glasses were simply piling-up in gigantic stacks around the factory building –
using-up resources, getting in everybody’s way, and taking-up all the useful
space.

When Harvey Jones was asked what to do, how to make the business profitable, he
said the first essential step was stop making the glasses.

*

Stop
now: this very minute, he said. Go out of this office and switch-off the
production line, send all the factory workers home (on full pay) for a few
weeks, and begin sorting it out.

But so long as the workers were attending daily, beavering-away, filling-in
paperwork, with raw materials pouring-in on thundering lorries; the masses of
defective glasses were being churned-out, stacked until they were blocking the
aisles and preventing anything useful being done... there was no hope.

Better
to pay people for doing nothing than this!

*

Same
with professional science – stop it now, for goodness sake!

Switch-off
the assembly line - please!

Stop
wasting vast human and physical resources in piling-up useless stuff that
nobody wants. Better to pay researchers to do nothing than this...

*

(Obviously
it would be better if people did something useful than nothing – so maybe ex-professional
researchers could be dressed warmly and paid to lie across the threshold of
closed doors to function as draught-excluders?)

*

So,
here we have the problem of professional science today – it has been bloated by
decades of exponential growth into a bureaucratically-dominated heavy industry
Soviet factory, characterized by vastly inefficient mass production of shoddy
goods that nobody wants.

Science is hopelessly and utterly un-reformable while it continues to be so
big, continues to grow-and-grow, and continues uselessly to churn out ever-more
of its sub-standard and unwanted goods.

Switch it off: stop making the defective glasses: now...

The pervasive dishonesty of modern
‘science’

How
did we get from useful and real science to useless research bureaucracies
generating hype and spin for the public relations industry?

Anyone
who has been a scientist for more than 20 years will realize that there has
been a progressive, significant and indeed qualitative decline in the
honesty of communications between scientists, between scientists and their
employing institutions, and between scientists and their institutions and the
outside world.

In
a nutshell – science has gone from being basically honest to basically
dishonest (and in the process gone from being real science to professional
research).

*

Naturally
enough, the pervasive atmosphere of dishonesty has long since led to scientists
being dishonest with themselves - and once this happened the situation
of endemic corruption itself became wholly deniable.

(The
primary and fundamental act of scientific dishonesty is: denial of the
pervasive reality of scientific dishonesty.)

The
situation now is that what calls itself scientific research is essentially
dishonest, not incidentally so; such that honest (real) science is on the one
hand very rare and on the other hand it has negligible impact on the conduct of
mainstream research.

(From
my experience it seems that real science is nowadays more likely to be
actively-suppressed, and real scientists systematically persecuted, than for
either to be encouraged.)

*

More
exactly, mainstream research is not so much dishonest as non-honest: it
is simply unconcerned by matters such as seeking truth and rigid
truthfulness in its discourse. Mainstream research is not about truth –
it is doing other things.

*

So
of course modern ‘science’ is dishonest – why on earth should it be
honest when it is not even trying to be honest? Research is not being
done to find the truth, experiments are not done to test the truth, scientific
ideas and results are not written-up in order to communicate the truth.

Truth
doesn’t go into it. Why on earth, then, should anybody imagine that truth will
come out of it?

Mainstream
professional research is no more about honesty than advertising, politics or
official statistics are about honesty.

Which
is to say that in modern professional research there is just enoughnarrowly-factual accuracy to render deniable its basic and motivated
dishonesty.

*

Yet
real science must be an arena where truth is the rule; or else the
activity simply stops being science and becomes something else – professional
research, a job, a bureaucratic institution, an arbitrary activity done to
justify funding.

The
honesty of real science is not merely a desirable feature, an optional
extra, it is intrinsic to the activity – real science is built-around honesty
as its core ethic.

Discard
honesty and there is nothing left of science.

*

Mathematicians
know that even random (accidental, undirected) errors multiply very rapidly –
third and fourth generation analogue recording are more crackle than music and
beyond that there is just crackle. Yet random errors occur equally in both
directions from the signal, noise tends to cancel out; and so can be averaged.
The signal can be retrieved from even a great deal of noise.

But
systematic error cannot be averaged, because there is no reason to
assume that falsity is equally distributed on either side of the truth: and
dishonesty is a systematic error.

Truth
cannot be retrieved from a mass of lies
– so without strict honesty, truth is simply lost...

Communications within the science
profession

The
most egregious domain of untruthfulness is probably where scientists speak or
write about their own work.

When
modern researchers are preparing applications for funding, there is clearly no
notion that they should be trying to communicate the truth. The idea would be
regarded as ridiculous! The whole motive and rationale of the exercise is to
write a successful application: in other words to get yourself money by
selling (what you claim are) your research results and plans.

The
veracity of what is being claimed is merely a means to an end.
The funder neither expects truth nor does the applicant expect to write truth –
grantsmanship is thus a kind of game (albeit with high stakes) where one
side sets up the rules, and the other side tries to be as dishonest as it can
get away with, while sticking to the letter of the rules - then the first side
tries to catch them out in an inconsistency.

Modern
research grant proposals therefore resemble the official accounts of organized
crime – everyone knows that they are intentionally and carefully faked, but the
auditors are allowed only to check for internal consistency among the lies. Consistent
lying is fine – indeed admired and rewarded.

So
long as the information in grant proposals and research publications has been
thoroughly laundered, then everybody is happy (well, ‘everybody’ who has
influence over career success – and for modern researchers that is
everybody-who-matters...).

*

When
a modern researcher describes the nature and significance of his research to
another researcher in the same field, for example in a writing a publication or
speaking at a conference or in the casual interactions of scientific life; or
to a bureaucrat or official who might directly or indirectly influence his pay
and conditions (say a university administrator); or to a journalist or media
person, or even to a random member of the public – there is no notion of the
modern researcher trying to be truthful about the nature and significance of
his research.

Trying
strictly to be truthful would indeed be regarded as evidence of naiveté,
or – if persisted-with - actively dangerous.

Modern
research communication is strategic – it is a means to an end:
and the degree of veracity of what is being said is controlled by the
requirements of that end.

Dishonesty as pervasive, endemic

Once
they have been observed, selected and trained; real scientists are unreflectingly honest and will trust each
other; but their honesty is also enforced by a multitude of informal processes
– if, after being trusted, that trust is betrayed there is the permanent
sanction of exclusion from real science. From that point, real scientists will
simply ignore you.

*

In
discussing the dishonesty of modern ‘science’ it is tempting to focus on cases
of ‘fraud’ – especially instances in which specific researchers have
fabricated, invented or deliberately distorted their results for personal gain.

It
is tempting but misleading, because it assumes honesty as a baseline. While real
scientists are indeed habitually truthful, modern professional researchers by
contrast are not even trying to be truthful.

Truth
is a positive value. However, at most, modern researchers are trying not
to be factually incorrect – which is as different from trying to be
truthful as a scandal-mongering tabloid ‘investigative’ journalist is different
from Einstein.

This
is not a subtle matter. Nor is it a matter for debate. It is absolutely plain
and obvious on a day-by-day level in the conduct and conversation of
modern researchers. Compared with real scientists, the mass of modern
researchers (including, perhaps especially, scientific leaders) are neither
motivated nor regulated by truth, nor do they speak about truth, nor do they
discriminate on the basis of truthfulness.

*

You
doubt this?

Just
watch! Just listen! Just read! So long as you can tell the difference between on the
one hand someone trying to be as truthful as they can be, and on the other hand
someone trying to sellsomething – then it is a no-brainer.

Dishonesty with oneself

So
pervasive are the petty misrepresentations and cautious lies, it is evidence
that many scientists are now dishonest even with themselves, in the privacy of
their own thoughts.

Such
things can happen to initially honest people either by force of habit, or
because they never knew any better (never having met, leave-aside worked-with,
a real scientist); and because lies breed lies in order to explain the
discrepancies between predictions and observations, between claims and
outcomes.

*

Lying
to oneself may be one cause of the remarkable incoherence of so much modern
scientific thinking, when coherence is evaluated across the whole range of
human knowledge.

(The
coherence of modern science is restricted to the micro-specialty; where it is
the artificial result of laundering rather than natural consequence of honestly
reporting perceived reality.)

It
is much easier to be coherent, and to recognize incoherence, when discourse is
uncontaminated by deliberate misrepresentations. There is less to cover-up.

Most
people can think-straight only by being completely honest with themselves and
with everybody else. Maybe straight thinking doesn’t matter in some areas of life
– but science is about straight thinking or it is nothing.

If
scientists are not honest even with themselves, then their work will be a mess
– or rather, because modern researchers are not honest with themselves
their work is a mess.

*

Scientists
are usually too cautious and timid to risk telling outright lies about
important things, or to invent and emphasize fake data; but instead they
push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as
possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased
over recent years.

So
it is now routine, normal, indeed required behaviour for scientists
deliberately to exaggerate, to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and
performance, and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.

The
envelope of exaggeration is now extended to the not-impossible: so if it is in
reality not-impossible that my research might (under highly
implausible but not-impossible combinations of conditions) assist in
some way in curing cancer... then it is nowadays permissible (in a ‘good’ cause
– i.e. when it is expedient) to present the research as being progress
towards curing cancer.

In
sum, when a modern researcher says ‘my research is progress towards curing
cancer’ it really means ‘it is not impossible that my research could
conceivably count as progress towards curing cancer’.

*

Furthermore,
it is entirely normal and unremarkable for ordinary ‘scientists’ to spend their
entire professional life doing work they know in their hearts to be trivial or
bogus – preferring that which promotes their career over that which has the
best chance of advancing science.

Indeed,
it is entirely normal and unremarkable for the best modern ‘scientists’
to spend their entire professional life doing sub-optimal work they know in
their hearts to be less scientifically ambitious than they are capable of.

In
a nutshell the most successful modern researchers have replaced scientific
ambition with career ambition.

Far
from being frowned-upon, such gross and treacherous misapplication of research
effort is positively encouraged, nay enforced, and not just sometimes
but as the norm in many places and by many people, including what are supposed
to be the best places for research (universities and other institutions);
because careerism is a more reliable route to high productivity than real
science.

In
fact it may be impossible to get a job, or get tenure, or promotion - except by
dumping idealism and scientific ambition and embracing low-risk careerism.

*

Indeed,
senior scientists in the best places are clever, hard-working and
intelligent enough rapidly to become expert at hyping mundane research to
create a misleading impression of revolutionary importance. Far from resisting,
or fighting, the degradation of science; the senior researchers at the ‘best’
places have led (indeed driven) their subordinates into a morass
of corruption, like so many demonically-possessed Gadarene swine.

It
is a kind of Gresham’s Law at work; when dishonest research is treated as if it
were real science; then bad research drives out the good.

*

So,
in real science there is, there must be, zero-tolerance for dishonesty
and zero-compromise with truthfulness.

Truth-telling
and truth-seeking must not be regarded as mere ideals within science, but as iron
laws, continually and universally operative.

Causes of dishonesty in science

Although
some scientists are selfishly dishonest simply in order to promote their own
careers, for most people quasi-altruistic arguments for lying (dishonesty in a
good cause of helping others, or to be an agreeable colleague) are likely to be
a more powerful inducement to routine untruthfulness than is the gaining of
personal advantage.

For
example, scientists are strongly pressured to be less-than-wholly-truthful for
the benefit of their colleagues or institutions, or for official/political
reasons – for example in fund-raising, or complying with inspections or
external research evaluations.

(And
in areas of science that impinge on the taboos of political correctness or the
imperatives of ‘progressive’ politics, honesty is punishable with extreme
disincentives – career termination, media-orchestrated vilification, legal
prosecution, threatened and actual violence.)

*

Often,
scientists are unable (without attracting severe sanctions) to opt-out of
administrative or managerial exercises which all-but insist-upon
dishonest responses – and for which colleagues expect dishonesty in
order to promote the interests of the group.

Failure
to comply would be seen as selfish scrupulousness at the expense of colleagues.
There would be no support from scientific leaders – whose careers stand to
benefit most from success in administrative or managerial exercises.

Project
leaders may feel responsible for raising money to support the livelihood of
their junior team members; and feel obliged to do whatever type of research is
most generously funded, and to say or write whatever is necessary to obtain
that funding.

Failure
to do whatever it takes to secure funding or survival in a bureaucratic
system would be seen as a failure to provide for your dependents – as
sacrificing peoples livelihoods on the altar of your own smug desire to
feel virtuous...

*

So,
in a bureaucratic context where cautious and consistent dishonesty is rewarded,
strict truthfulness is taboo and will cause trouble for colleagues, for
teams, for whole institutions.

Because
when everyone else is exaggerating their achievement then any precisely accurate
person will be judged as even worse than their already modest claims.

If
every fourth rate scientist is claiming to be third rate – but after
inflation-adjustment is judged to be fourth rate; then honestly to label
oneself as fourth rate would lead to being to be judged as fifth rate - on the
assumption that you, like everyone else, must be indulging in hype.

In
this kind of situation, individual truthfulness will be interpreted either as
simply stupid, or as an irresponsible indulgence.

*

Clearly
then, even in the absence of the sort of direct coercion which prevails in many
un-free societies, scientists may be subjected to such pressure that they are
more-or-less forced to be dishonest; and this situation can (in decent
people) lead to feelings of regret, or to shame and remorse.

The
only alternative is some species of martyrdom.

*

This
is a situation which leads decent people to feel shame and remorse.

Unfortunately,
shame may not lead to remorse but instead to rationalization, to self-exculpation,
to the elaborate construction of excuses - and eventually a denial of
dishonesty. In other words, shame may lead to aggressive hypocrisy.

But
eventually the situation leads many to cynicism; hypocrisy is abandoned as
ludicrously implausible – and there is a cynical advocacy of dishonesty.
Such cynics feel they are merely being honest in advocating open dishonesty,
because everyone is doing this anyway. Better – they think – to be a cynic
advocating evil than a hypocrite pretending to good.

Yet,
whatever are the motivations and reasons for research dishonesty, it has been
by such means that modern ‘scientists’ have become inculcated into habitual
falsity; until people have become used-to dishonesty, don’t notice dishonesty,
eventually come to expect and finally insist-upon dishonesty.

Roots of dishonesty in science – the
role of peer review

My
belief is that science has rotted from the head down – from the top to
the bottom - and therefore blame mostly lies with senior ‘scientists’.

The
careerism of senior ‘scientists’, and their abandonment of the Iron Law of
truthfulness, has been the main cause of the now pervasive corruption of
science (not least because the senior appoint the junior, the bosses choose the
minions).

So
the roots of dishonesty in science constitute a ‘treason of the clerks’
phenomenon.

*

While
the ultimate cause of the treason has been the abandonment of truth conceived
as a transcendental value – as I argue below – the proximate mechanism
by which corruption has been implemented was peer review.

Since
the middle twentieth century there has been a massive expansion and not influence
of peer review, peer review infiltrated into all the major scientific
evaluations – peer review has become the self-perceived core process of
science.

Yet
peer review is no more, no less, than the opinion of senior scientists. And
individual judgment, but a procedure for gathering opinions of a group,
followed by some kind of more-or-less formal, more-or-less explicit procedure
for deriving a single decision from the group of opinions: by vote, by veto, by
some kind of weighted quantification, by an impressionistic judgment of the
decision, or whatever.

In
practice, most peer review is a ‘black box’ mechanism – and all the more
effective for its unknown operations. A question is fed-into the black box of
peer review, some senior scientists deliberate in some way and some answer
emerges – an answer that is impossible to critique yet regarded as
authoritative (as if a committee of senior scientists constituted a kind
of super-hero-scientist with magically-combined wisdom and expertise!)

The
essence of peer review is therefore the ‘peers’ – which implicitly means a
plurality of senior figures from (broadly) the same domain or field of research
endeavour; and the ‘review’ element which in some way derives a bimodal or
categorical evaluation from the plurality of opinions.

*

To
put it another way, the triumph of peer review is a triumph of the committee
over the individual, of procedure over judgment, of the selective and explicit
over the unbounded and implicit.

The
even-more-significant aspect of peer review is the rhetorical success of
implying that a committee procedure is more objective and more valid
than individual judgment; the almost-wholly successful trick of disguising that
peer review is pure opinion, and therefore just as ‘unreliable’ and prone to
corruption as individual judgment – but that in fact peer review is worse than
individual judgment for the same reason that a committee decision is
intrinsically worse than an individual decision: because the committee decision
is removed from individual responsibility, hence removed from responsibility
altogether.

(Responsibility
is an attribute of individual authority. Without I.A. there is no
responsibility – merely a legal contract.)

Yet
peer review is neither necessary nor sufficient as a definition of
science, it is orthogonal to science; and therefore domination by
peer review marks the disappearance of ‘real science’ and the inclusion of its
activities within the system of large, complex trans-national bureaucracies.

*

So
peer review does not solve the problem of subjectivity; rather it replaces
potentially responsible individual subjectivity with necessarily irresponsible group
subjectivity.

Thus
the advantage of peer review is precisely the opposite of its propaganda – peer
review has become universal because it is irresponsible, not despite
this.

For
peer review; irresponsibility is a feature, not a bug.

*

Overall,
senior scientists have set a bad example of untruthfulness, self-seeking and lack
of principle in their own behaviour, and (surely not unrelated) they have
also tended to administer science in such a way as to reward hype and
careful-dishonesty, and punish modesty and strict truth-telling.

Some
senior scientists have laudably refused to compromise their honesty, however
they have done this largely by quietly ‘opting-out’, and not much by using
their power and influence to create and advertise alternative processes and
systems in which honest scientists might work. They have not exposed the
pervasive and mandatory dishonesty of modern ‘science.

Presumably
they began by not wanting to discredit what real science still remained,
but ended by colluding in the disguise of the non-scientific nature of pseudo-scientific
professional research.

But,
to be fair to the honest real scientists, those that did speak out loudly and clearly
– such as Erwin Chargaff - were first marginalized, then ridiculed, then completely
ignored and forgotten – as being embittered failures, motivated by ‘sour
grapes’ and envy...

*

Peer
review - of ever greater complexity, hence irresponsibility - has now been
applied everywhere: to academic education and research training, job
appointments and promotions, to scientific publications and conferences, to
ethical review, to research funding, to the allocation of medals, prizes and
awards.

And
peer review processes are set-up and manned by senior scientists. In a sense,
peer review (where it matters, where it makes a difference to policy and
practice) simply is monopolization of all evaluation, reward or
punishment processes by senior scientists; yet not as autonomous individuals
but as components of a process which nobody-in-particular controls.

This
seems something like the worst of all possible worlds; most of the actual
disadvantages of tyranny but without any of the potential advantages of having
‘somebody’ in control.

Modern ‘science’ is de facto
dishonest

Of
course not every single modern scientist is dishonest, and not every last
branch of professional science is corrupt.

However,
in practice, they might as well be.

By
‘in practice’ I mean to make that distinction that, from the transcendental and
ultimate perspective, corruption is an evil and thus every individual science
who holds out against the prevailing dishonesty counts.

Yet
when honest scientists and truthful specialties are disarticulated from
the processes of mainstream science (especially from the outputs of peer review
processes) then these do not affect functioning of the system.

The
existence of a few honest souls does not refute the charge of general scientific
dishonesty – just as the existence of a handful of impartial judges does not
refute the charge of systemic legal corruption.

(After
all the rare honest judge can be, often is, over-ruled by corrupt superiors. It
happens.)

Peer review is neither a necessary nor
sufficient part of real science

I
have often read comments which state explicitly, or assume implicitly, that
peer review is what sets science apart from other (less valid) modes of
knowledge.

Peer
review is notnecessary, nor was peer review a feature of science
in its golden age, when science worked best – most effectively and efficiently.

Old
writings never mention anything like modern peer review. In those eras decision
making was mostly, sometimes wholly, individual and personal (with
certain exceptions where a ‘collegial’ method of decision making was used to
allocate goods that were generated and controlled by an institution).

And
peer review is notdistinctive to science, but is indeed (very
obviously – I would have thought) found in all academic subjects
nowadays; and is characteristic of many formal bureaucracies. Indeed, peer
review is perhaps the defining feature, the hallmark of modern bureaucracies in
which personal responsibility has been replaced by (deliberately, not
accidentally) unaccountable committee procedures.

*

The
over-expansion and domination of peer review in science is therefore a sign of
scientific decline and decadence, not (as so commonly asserted) a sign of
increased rigour.

Peer
review as the ultimate arbiter represents the conversion of real science to
generic bureaucracy; a replacement of testing knowledge by opinions about
knowledge; a replacement of objectivity by subjectivity – imposing a procedural
but arbitrary subjectivity rather than having individual subjectivity linked to
responsibility.

And
the increased role for de facto irresponsibility in science has created
space into which dishonesty has expanded.

When
modern ‘science’ is not honest, as it typically is not, then peer review ensures
that nobody-in-particularis identifiably to-blame for the
situation.

*

As
well as from the careerism of senior scientists, inducements to dishonesty have
also come from outside of science – from politics, government administration
and the media (for example), all of whom are continually attempting to distort
science to their own agenda and covert real science to the service of their
power.

At
present, the situation in the UK is that a researcher cannot get money from a
government source without perjuring themselves.

(Naturally,
I refer to perjury by appropriately scientific criteria of departure from
absolute truth-full-ness; and not by irrelevant legal criteria of
perjury as provable-lying.)

(The
skill of scientific perjury, as practiced by the most modern successful
researchers, is indeed precisely to commit scientific perjury while avoiding
legal perjury.)

*

But
whatever the origin of the pressures to corrupt science, it is obvious that the
scientific leadership have themselves been corrupted and co-opted.

The
alternative would have been inflexible resistance on a matter of principle –
the principle of truth-seeking and truth-speaking as an Iron Law intrinsic to
science, even to the point of ‘martyrdom’.

Notable
individuals from past generations of scientists did indeed stand up for their
beliefs to the extent of being sacked, imprisoned, exiled or even killed. We
moderns can only stand in awe of such principled behaviour.

But
modern ‘scientists’ have been kept in-line without any need for recourse to
such draconian measures. The mildest of implied threats have been enough to
convert real scientists into careerist drones.

In real science truth must be a
transcendental value

Why, how did past generations of real scientist behave so much better –
so much more truthfully - than modern professional researchers?

I
have come to believe that real science depends for its long-term success on an
explicit and pervasive pursuit of the ideal of transcendental truth.

‘Transcendental’ implies that a value is outside the material world; is real,
stable and ultimate – it is aimed-at but can only imperfectly and imprecisely be
known, achieved or measured.

So,
transcendental truth is an ideal but actual thing, located outside of science;
beyond and above scientific methods, processes and peer consensus.

*

Transcendental
truth is not, therefore, evaluated by science; but is instead the proper
aim of real science. It is regulatory of real science.

(Technically,
transcendental truth is a metaphysical assumption. And
that-there-is-no-such-thing-as-transcendental-truth is also a metaphysical
assumption.)

Especially
truth is the proper aim of scientists as individuals. In other words, science
should be a social system constituted by individual scientists who are
dedicated truth-seekers: whose practice of science includes ‘truth talk’ that
references current actuality to ideal aspirations and who practice ‘the habit
of truth’.

Real
science is not, therefore, made of institutions, nor organizations, nor of
rules, methods nor processes – real science is made by, done by, individuals:
people working together to discover and communicate reality.

Jacob Bronowski on the habit of
truth

Jacob
Bronowski (1908-1974) invented the term 'the habit of truth' to describe the
fundamental and distinctive ethic of science: the main foundation upon which
was built the success of science, providing the means (knowledge) for mankind
to shape the natural world.

Bronowski emphasized this, since it was (and is) often imagined that science is
a morally neutral activity. This is wrong. Because, although scientific
knowledge is indeed morally neutral (and can be used for good or evil), the practice
of science (including being a scientist) is certainly a moral activity - based
on the habit of truth.

He argued that for science to be truthful as a whole it is not sufficient to
aim at truth as an ultimate outcome, scientists must also be habitually
truthful in the ‘minute particulars’ of their scientific lives.

The
end does not justify the means, instead Bronowski argued that the means
are indivisible from the end: scientific work is ‘of a piece, in the large and
in detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect
ourselves and our ends together’.

*

Bronowski’s
insight was that – to be successful in terms of the test of shaping the natural
world, each and every scientist in his scientific communications must speak the
truth as he understands it.

To
put it another way – scientists must be trying to seek the truth, trying
to be truthful – all the time and about everything.

Indeed,
I think it likely that the social structure of science is at root nothing
more than a group of people investigating reality who seek truth and speak
truth habitually (and if, or when, they cannot be truthful, they will either
state this or say nothing).

*

Bronowski
perceived that societies which abandoned, indeed persecuted, the habit of truth
– such as, in his time, the USSR and Nazi Germany – paid the price in terms of
losing their ability to perceive or generate the underlying knowledge of
reality which forms the basis of shaping the natural world.

(Note
– these were societies which had had the habit of truth in science at one time,
but then ‘lost’ it; or rather – like ourselves – actively crushed it.)

This declining ability to shape the natural world was concealed with
propaganda, but such concealment could only be temporary since the cause of the
decline was strengthened by every attempt to deny it.

But,
the scientific failures of Germany, and especially the USSR, were obvious in
comparison with the USA and the UK – however, when the USA and the UK abandoned
truth (along with pretty much all other places) then there was no comparator;
the effect was not obvious, could more easily be hidden...

(After
all, somebody will be awarded a Nobel Prize every year – whether or not
anybody deserves it, whether or not there is any real science
being done in the field in question.)

*

Having
grown up strongly under the influence of Bronowski (for good and for ill) and
also this distinctive morality of science, I have witnessed at first hand the
rapid loss of the habit of truth from science.

At
first I saw an encapsulated
loss whereby scientists continued to be truthful with each other (that is,
truthful in the sense of speaking the truth as they see it) while lying to
outsiders (especially in order to get grants, promote their research, and to
deflect criticism)...

Then scientists stopped being truthful with other
scientists (who were now seen as competitors, gatekeepers, potential
patrons)...

After
which the situation degenerating
swiftly to the final surrender whereby scientists are no longer truthful even
with themselves.

*

At
the same time I have seen hype (i.e. propaganda) expand from being merely a
superficial sheen added to real science in order to make it more interesting to
the general public, to the present situation where hype defines reality
for scientists (as well as everyone else) – where propaganda is so pervasive
that nobody can know what – maybe nothing at all, or the opposite to the
propaganda – lies beneath it.

There
is, indeed, no ‘beneath’ since by now hype goes all the way through science:
from top to bottom, inside and out.

A 50 year experiment in
excluding transcendental truth from scientific discourse

Although
the ultimate scientific authority of a transcendental value of truth (located
outside of current scientific practice) was a view almost universally held by
the greatest scientists throughout recorded history, and was a frequent topic
of discourse among scientists and in the literature until the mid-20th century;
modern science has pretty much dispensed with the idea of truth.

References
to truth in an ultimate sense have by now been all-but banished from
professional scientific literature and discourse; being regarded by a younger
generation of hard-nosed and technically-orientated researchers as wishful,
mystical and embarrassing at best – and hypocritical or manipulative at worst.

Instead,
all disputes are constrained to operate within an evaluation system of
proximate methodology and peer approved standard practice.

*

Such
exclusion of references to truth from scientific discourse could be regarded as
an experiment which has been gathering support for about 50 years –
although the overlapping of scientific generations meant that senior scientists
continued to discuss truth in a transcendental fashion at least into the 1980s,
and a handful still continue.

The
experiment in exclusion of truth talk was driven (presumably) partly by the
desire for greater efficiency (the desire for less metaphysical
chit-chat and more hard science) – and partly on the belief that
transcendental values serve no practical function – merely waste time
and energy, confuse and mislead. The assumption was that science could
more-efficiently be done using just internal, professional (within-science) evaluations.

Partly
it was also driven by the increasing prevalence of materialist atheism – such
that ‘scientists’ no longer believe in transcendental reality; indeed some modern
‘scientists’ seem not to believe that there is any reality separate from
social structures that describe and define what-counts-as-truth. They seem to
operate on the basis that reality is ‘socially constructed’.

Modern
‘scientists’ are not interested in whether something really is true; they are
interested only in whether peer review says it is true – they are
interested only in whether something is fashionable, funded, publishable in
high-impact fora, and likely to attract jobs, promotions and prizes.

Even
those who publicly oppose and ridicule the idea of social construction of
‘reality’ behave as if a vote from a peer review committee of senior ‘scientists’
is the nearest possible approximation to truth – which is a view as close to
pure reality-denying nihilism as makes no difference...

*

This
profound shift within science was described tellingly in Real Science by
the late John Ziman (1925-2005) (from whom I took the sub-title of this book).
Ziman was a British physicist of great distinction as well as a philosopher and
sociologist of science, and on the advisory board of Medical Hypotheses
when I was editor.

Ziman
termed the transformation in science during his lifetime a change from
‘academic science’ to ‘post-academic science’.

Academic
science is what I call ‘real’ science; post-academic science is what I call
‘professional research’.

*

In
Ziman’s description, post-academic’ discourse is implicitly framed such
that questions of truth have lost their meaning. It is a type of Big Science –
focused on the organization and funding of projects.

Real
Science memorably describes the
transformation in the fine texture of a successful scientist’s life, the day to
day activities.

The
old style ‘academic’ or real scientist does science – tries to discover,
theorise and describe the truth about reality.

But
the typical day of a modern, professional-researching post-academic
‘scientist’ is non-overlappingly distinct from this. It is, in essence, the
life of a bureaucrat, of a manager – combining personnel administration and
project organizing with public relations, arranging for publication,
fund-raising, publicity and presentations.

*

The
lack of any anchor from research practice to transcendental truth has rendered
many areas of modern ‘science’ a kind of ‘glass bead game’ (to use the term
from Herman Hesse’s novel), comprising research disciplines that are
free-spinning cogs with little or no explanatory, predictive or manipulative
connection with the natural world.

By
its ultimate reliance on professional evaluations (various different versions
of peer review applied to research funding, publication, prizes, promotions,
etc.) modern ‘science’ has become structurally indistinguishable from
academic literary criticism: both being arcane, technically non-intuitive and rigorous,
sometimes intellectually brilliant – but ultimately internally-validated fashion-driven
high brow pastimes comprised of ringing variations for the sake of career
advancement.

The experiment in trying to do science without reference to transcendental
truth has therefore failed utterly. In discarding transcendental truth, science
discarded what had made it science.

What
is left over is a fundamentally dishonest sham which tries to claim the
distinctive validity of real science without submitting to the iron discipline
of truth.

But is truth really true, or
was it just a convenient fiction?

It
seems that transcendental truth is needed in science, for science to work, for
science to remain science.

Only when science is truth-seeking can its practice mobilize the most profound
dedication from its practitioners – a level of motivation far greater than that
elicited by peer-approval-seeking science, or science done from a familial or
social sense of duty.

Recall;
when scientists believed in truth they would historically suffer hardship
(sometimes extreme hardship, prison, even death) for their scientific beliefs.
But nowadays even the mere possibility of being passed over for a grant or
promotion is sufficient to terrify ‘scientists’ into submission.

Another
reason for valuing truth is the need for science as a social system to tolerate
(and if possible actively support) individuals who seek truth – even when this
generates greater risk and a short term reduction in performance.

Likewise
the discipline of transcendental truth enables science to tolerate the fact
that many brilliant and creative scientists will often have unworldly, erratic
or abrasive personalities.

In
other words, only the living presence of truth in the daily practice of
science may provide a higher context for decision-making in which
considerations of social expediency can potentially be transcended.

*

But
despite these advantages, the ‘big question’ for any modern scientist is
whether transcendental truth really is ‘true’ or is merely a convenient
fiction.

By ‘convenient fiction’ I mean the idea that even if it could
convincingly be argued that scientists work better when they believe in
transcendental truth; such ’truth’ is actually no more than a delusion,
albeit a useful delusion.

The
convenient fiction argument is that in reality there is no such thing as truth
but it is a good thing for science and for society when scientists act as if
truth is real.

*

The
discussion then moves beyond science, and to the presuppositions of science;
moves to a level of the basic understanding of things – in other words, to
metaphysics.

Early
scientists generally assumed (I mean they assumed at a metaphysical
level – as their conception of the nature of reality) that the truth was reality
- a property of the universe created by a god.

Truth
(knowledge of reality) was communicated in outline to humans partly by being
in-built (by god) as human nature and partly from divine revelation; truth was
understood by means of reason (which was valid because also god-given), and applied
to the study of Nature by god-given human ingenuity.

Early
scientists therefore believed in both god/s and truth.

Later
scientists (from the late 19th century into the early 20th
century) were atheists about god but realists about truth. For example Albert
Einstein had an abstract, or pantheistic view of an ordered universe and a belief
in the fortunate (but not god-given) rational and intuitive ability of humans
to understand the nature of reality.

*

Most
of these scientists of several generations ago were theists, more or
less; believing in an impersonal god who created order (and the order was real
– for example mathematics or the laws of physics were real); but setting-aside
divine aspects of individual salvation, meaning and purpose.

Another
generation or two onwards, and most of the best scientists were atheists about god
and also did not believe in the reality of truth. They disbelieved in both God
and truth, nonetheless the best scientists continued to behave as if
they did regard truth as real. For example Richard Feynman was not religious
and seemingly did not believe in transcendental truth but anyway lived
and worked by a strict personal ethic of truthfulness and truth-seeking.

Modern
scientists have abandoned all this as so much useless baggage. They are
atheists about god, relativists about truth, and careerists in their behaviour:
they neither believe, nor behave as if they believe, in transcendental truth.

*

So,
the historical sequence was: theism, deism, atheism.

Deism
perhaps enabled the greatest science; but deism was temporary and en route
between theism and atheism.

How
a scientist behaves is clearly more important than his or her belief system. Einstein
and Feynman behaved (with respect to science) in an exemplary fashion.

Yet
viewed through the ‘retrospectoscope’ I am not convinced of the coherence or
long-term sustainability of Feynman’s views – nor even Einstein’s.

To
be truthful yet believing neither in transcendental truth nor in a personal
relationship with deity, now just looks like another unstable phase
between theism and atheism – a perspective restricted to the transitional generation
of people who were brought-up religiously then abandoned it in adulthood.

The
next generation, their children and grand-children – born from the
mid-twentieth century onwards, were brought-up as secular materialists, have
moved decisively to atheism and also to non-truthfulness.

*

In
a nutshell, it seems that there are several ways to live by transcendental
truth – ranging from formal religion to a pragmatic assumption that it is
expedient to act as-if truth were real.

But
some belief systems relating to truth are more stable and coherent than others,
and some belief systems are more powerfully motivating than others.

For
scientists, the crucial matter is that each real scientist must, must, must
(for whatever reason) work according to a binding personal ethic of the importance
and reality of transcendental truth – that truth lies beyond and above science;
and science must be practiced according to this reality

Not even trying...

While
wanting to know the truth does not mean that you will find the truth; on
the other hand, if scientists are not even trying to discover the truth
- then the truth certainly will not be discovered.

Even
if stumbled-upon, or tripped-over by happy accident by someone not looking
for it, then truth will fail to be recognized as true.

If
the truth is in a particular direction, then there are many more directions (an
infinite number of them) where the truth cannot be found; so when a
researcher is not looking for the truth, the chances of finding it are
one to infinity.

In
a nutshell, there are an infinite number of ways to be wrong, but only one way
to be right.

(Of
course, nobody is ever completely right – but even to be approximately right entails the objective reality of universal and
eternal truth.)

*

'Truth'
can be defined as 'underlying reality’. Science is not the only way of
discovering truth (for example, philosophy is also about discovering truth -
science being in its origin a sub-specialty of philosophy) - but unless an
activity is trying to discover underlying reality, then certainly it cannot be
science.

But what motivates someone to want to discover the truth about
something?

The great scientists are all very strongly motivated to ‘want to know’ about
reality, and this drove them to great efforts, risk, hardship - and kept them
at their task for decades.

Why
scientists should be interested in one thing rather than another thing remains
a mystery – but what is clear is that this interest cannot be dictated but
arises from within – having arisen it can be encouraged but not re-directed.

Real
science is a vocation.

*

Francis
Crick commented that you should research that about which you gossip,
James Watson commented that you should avoid subjects which bore you.

Their
point was that science is so difficult, that when motivation is
deficient then problems will not get solved.

You
need, you must have, spontaneous positive interest (the gossip test) and
you cannot solve problems that bore you because real science is too hard to
succeed without the benefit of spontaneous interest.

Motivation
needs all the help it can get – hence real science cannot be dictated. It
cannot be planned.

The
directed provision of research funding and the implementation of research strategy
can certainly make people ‘do research’ in a particular field; but it cannot
make them do real science.

*

But there is an opposite assumption at work in mainstream modern ‘science’; the
idea that professional researchers should properly be motivated by career
incentives such as appointments, pay and promotion – and not by
their intrinsic interest in a problem.

This
is rationalized on the basis that personal motivations are a probable source of
bias.

Well,
maybe they are – but without personal motivation you don’t get science at all.

The
way to get valid science is not to employ people who care so little about what
they study that they are impartially uninterested in everything and will
believe and work on anything.

The
way to get valid science is to have a group of inevitably-biased people working
together to seek the truth – the motivation to seek truth will find ways to
deal with bias, as was seen many times in the history of science.

In
reality, the bureaucrats who run science just do not want vocationally
motivated scientists as employees, since they are intrinsically awkward individuals
- precisely for the reason that their beliefs and activities can neither easily
nor wholly be shaped by career incentives.

*

By
contrast, careerist research drones who want to be ‘successful’ will do
whatever they are told to do and will not do what they are punished for
doing. Careerist research drones would not, for example, insist on trying to
discover the structure of DNA when they were supposed to be doing other things
– as did Crick and Watson.

Modern
pseudo-scientific bureaucrats would try very hard not to employ anyone
with the awkward personality traits of Crick and Watson, and indeed very few
modern researchers are of that type.

Thus
everything runs smoothly, people do exactly what they are supposed to do – and
the only problem is that zero real science gets done...

However,
that ‘perception’ is easily fixed by public relations, hype and spin.

The peer review cartel

The
modern scientist is supposed to be a docile and obedient bureaucrat and is
trained and selected for that purpose – cheerfully switching ‘interests’ and
tasks as required by the changing (or unchanging) imperatives of funding, the
fashions of research and the orders of his master.

What determines a modern scientist’s choice of problem? Essentially it is peer
review – the modern scientist is supposed to do whatever work that the
cartel of peer-review-dominating scientists decide he should do and reward him
for doing.

This will almost certainly involve working as a team member for one or more of
the peer review cartel scientists (or their out-sourced ‘suppliers’); doing
some kind of allocated micro-specialized task of no meaning and zero intrinsic
interest – but one which, supposedly, contributes to the overall project being
managed by the peer review cartel members.

Of
course the funders and grant awarders have the major role in what science gets
done, and these are all parts of an interconnected bureaucratic web of senior
professional researchers. The allocation of funding, hence the direction of
research and the subjects deemed acceptable, has long since been captured by
the peer review cartel.

*

Even
more importantly than choosing the subject matter of research, the peer review
cartel has captured the ability to define success in solving scientific
problems.

To
solve a problem, the cartel of dominant scientists in a field simply declares
that the problem has been solved!

Since
peer review is now regarded as the gold standard of science, when the peer
review cartel announces that a problem has been solved, then that problem has by
definition been solved.

Since truth is no longer transcendental but internal to research then nothing
more needs be said: indeed there is nothing more to say. Power is truth (in
modern research).

And
anyone who disagrees is not competent to have an opinion, also by definition.

*

To
what does the modern ‘scientist’ aspire? Obviously not to discover the truth
about reality. Instead, he aspires to become a member of the peer review cartel
– one of the group who allocate ‘success’ in science.

In
other words, the modern ‘scientist’ aspires to become a bureaucrat, a manager,
a ‘politician’. In yet other words, the modern ‘scientist’ aspires to power –
(im)pure and simple.

However,
being a modern high level bureaucrat, manager or politician is incompatible
with truthfulness, and dishonesty is incompatible with science; hence being a successful modern ‘scientist’ is
incompatible with the practice of real science.

Understanding reality

A
real scientist needs to want to understand reality - this necessarily
entails first believingin reality (believing that reality is
real), and secondly believing that one ought
to discover and describe reality (which is the specific vocation of a
scientist).

*

The
belief in reality is a necessary metaphysical belief, which cannot be denied
without contradiction - nonetheless, in modern ruling elite culture it is
frequently denied (this is called nihilism); which is why modern elite culture
is unprecedented in being irrational, self-contradictory (and self-destroying).

But
obviously, a real scientist cannot be a nihilist - whatever cynical or trendy
things he might say or do in public, in his heart he must have a transcendental
belief in the reality of reality and must want to know something of it.

Thus
a real scientist cannot be a member of the modern ruling elite –
therefore, a real scientist in the modern world must be powerless...

*

Science
also involves the metaphysical belief (‘metaphysical’ meaning a necessary
assumption which frames the practice of science, and is not itself part
of science) – a belief in the understandability of nature including the
human desire and capacity to understand.

(That
is, understandability at some level of approximation, sufficient
understanding - but not necessary detailed or comprehensive understanding.).

Without
this belief in the understandability of nature, science becomes an absurd and
impossible attempt to find the one truth among an infinite number of possible
errors.

Nonetheless,
in modern elite culture, a belief in the understandability of nature and human
capacity is routinely denied - another aspect of nihilism. Among many other
consequences, this denial destroys the science which makes possible modern
elite culture.

*

Explaining reality is a second step which may follow
understanding, but effective explaining needs to be preceded by the desire to explain
reality accurately, which itself entails honesty; again because there
are an infinite number of possible explanations varying in accuracy
between as close-as-possible to understood reality; to as far from accurate as
you can get-away-with.

*

Modern
science is undercut by many things - one is the difficulty for modern
scientists of working according to the proper motivations and beliefs of a real
scientist.

Transcendental
beliefs such as the reality of reality and the desirability of truth are
difficult to hold in isolation and in a hostile environment that imposes
multiple pressures to abandon proper motivations to expedience.

It
is difficult, in other words, for a modern scientist to work according to the
principles of real science; when to do so requires a lesser or greater
sacrifice of career and status. And when
any level of sacrifice of principles will negate the possibility of real
science.

Yet
the demands of real science are absolute. There can be no compromise with
truth.

And
the punishment for failure to be truthful is simple – failure of knowledge. No
progress in science – but instead loss and destruction of knowledge.

Real science declined because
scientific genius declined

That
science progressed overall, rapidly and by a great deal between, say, 1700 and
1950 can be assumed.

But
what drove this progress?

Scientific
progress is talked about in three main ways, depending on the numbers/
proportion of the population involved in generating this progress. We could
conceptualize science as the product of tiny minority of creative geniuses,
an eliteclass of professionals, or a masspopulation
of competence.

*

1.Genius – science as the product of 10s to 100s of
people per generation (for England at its height – much less for most other
places) – a fraction of one percent of the population.

This idea states that science
is the product of, depends on, a relatively small number of geniuses - without
whom there would be no significant progress.

Therefore an age of
scientific progress can be boiled down to the activity of tens or hundreds of
geniuses; and the history of science is a list of great men.

Since little/ nothing is
known about how to generate scientific genius, the task is mainly one of
selection of individuals; aiming to ensure that those who seem, potentially, to
posses creative genius are given the chance to implement it – rather like the
‘methods’ for discovering and developing top athletes and sportsmen, chess
grandmasters, or great singers and classical musicians.

1.*

2.Elite - 1000s to 10,000s of people per generation – a few
percent of the population.

Science is the product of an
elite of highly educated and trained people, usually found in a relatively
small number of elite and research-orientated institutions, linked in an
intensely intercommunicating network.

This elite are presumed to
generate, by their cooperation, significant scientific progress.

Without this elite, and
these elite institutions, there would be no significant progress.

According to this view, the
history of science is a history of institutions. So the promotion of science is
a matter of the creation and sustenance of elite degrees, elite universities,
elite research units etc.

A matter, therefore, of
selection of institutions.

*

3.Mass - 100,000s to millions of people per generation –
a large percent of the population, ideally most of the population.

By this view, science is the
product of a 'critical mass' of scientifically-orientated and educated people
spread across a nation or culture; and whose attitudes and various skills add
or synergize to generate scientific progress. If society as a whole is not
sufficiently 'scientific' in this sense, then there will not be significant
progress.

The history of science is seen
as a history of gradual transformation of populations - mainly by educational reform.
So the promotion of science is a matter of science teaching (e.g. in
STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics) – to as high a level
and for as many of the population as possible.

A (common) twist on this is
the idea that all humans have vast untapped potential - and that this potential
might somehow be activated - e.g. by the right kind of education;
leading to an elite of geniuses, or a mass-elite, or something...

*

Perhaps
the mainstream idea nowadays is a mushy kind of belief/ aspiration that science
is essentially elite but that the elite can be expanded indefinitely by
education and increased professionalization.

Another common modern variant is that scientific progress began as based
on individual creative genius, then became elite-driven, and nowadays is a mass
('democratic') movement.

However,
this is merely an historical description of what has actually happened (more or
less) to professional research - underpinned by the unchallenged (but
false) assumption that scientific progress has indeed been maintained
throughout this transition.

But
there is no reason to accept that assumption of continued progress (given the
vastly increased level and pervasiveness of hype and dishonesty in science).

Certainly
there do seem to be historical examples of scientific progress without need for
a prior scientific mass of the population, or even a pre-existing elite
gathered in elite institutions. It looks very much as if science is mostly a
product of individual genius; and a sufficient concentration and succession of
creative geniuses are the key necessity - without which scientific progress
will not happen.

*

Of
course, nowadays there are (approximately) zero geniuses in science, so
admitting that genius is necessary to significant scientific progress entails
admitting that we are not making progress.

Again:
admitting that there are no geniuses means admitting there is no progress...

which
admission would devastate all scientific careers, since these careers depend
upon the conviction and expectation of continued progress.

Therefore,
the necessity for genius in science is an hypotheses that cannot be
entertained.

*

Nonetheless,
my reading of the history of science is that a sufficient supply of genius really
is necessary to significant scientific progress (although history has not
always recorded the identities of the presumed geniuses).

At
any rate, science has often made significant progress without elites in the
modern sense, and elites often fail to make progress; and the idea that
scientific progress arises from mass education of the masses is very obviously sheer
moonshine, without a shred of evidence in support...

Furthermore,
if geniuses are necessary for real scientific progress, and if real
scientific progress is necessary for modernity (i.e. a society based-on
growth - such that growth in productivity will out-run population growth)...

And
if (as it seems) there are (for whatever reason) no more geniuses…

Then scientific progress has already stopped and will
not re-start (unless there can again be not just a few but a sufficiency of
real geniuses in science) – and modern society will in due course collapse due
to the usually-operative ‘Malthusian’ mechanism that the weight of population will
grow to be in excess of economic (especially food) production.

Human capability peaked decades ago,
and has since declined

What
is the ‘evidence’ for decline in science?

Clearly,
such evidence must be of the ‘common sense’ variety, since scientific
evaluations are precisely what is under question – we know they are poisoned by
dishonesty, hype and spin.

Here
is one item: I suspect that overall human capability (leaving aside
specific domains) reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of
the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.

*

This
may sound bizarre or just plain false, but the argument is simple. That business
of landing men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme
achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by
humans.

40
years ago we could do it – and repeatedly – but since then we have not
been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon
since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.

*

Of
course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because
we no longer wanted to go to the moon (done that, got the T-shirt...),
or could not afford to, or something…

But
I am suggesting that all this is so much hot air, merely excuses for not doing
something which we cannot do.

*

It
is as if an eighty year old ex-professional-cyclist was to claim that the
reason he had stopped competing in the Tour de France was that he had
now had found better ways to spend his time and money.

This
may be true; but does not refute the fact that an 80 year old could not successfully
compete in international cycling races even if he wanted to.

And
this fact would not be altered if the 80 year old had undergone extensive
plastic surgery and offered in evidence carefully ‘airbrushed’ photographs that
made him look as if he was just 45.

And
this fact would not be altered if he was able to do other things instead
(such as building better computers or making better televisions).

And
the fact would not be altered even if he presented the testimony of a panel of
prestigious doctors and physiologists who swore on oath that he could
win the Tour de France if he really wanted to.

He
may look like he can do it, he may be able to do other things, he may swear
that he could do it if he wanted to – but the telling fact is that he does
not do it.

*

Human
capability partly depends on technology. A big task requires a variety of
appropriate and interlocking technologies – the absence of any one vital
technology would prevent attainment.

I
presume that much technology has continued to improve since 1975 – so
technological decline is not likely to be the reason for failure of capability.

But,
however well planned, human capability in complex tasks also depends on
‘on-the-job’ problem-solving – the ability to combine expertise and creativity
to deal with unforeseen situations.

And
human capability also depends on attitude: with the primary imperative of getting-the-job-done.

*

It
is on-the-job problem-solving and getting-the-job-done attitudes which have
declined so sharply over recent decades – declined to the point of rendering
Western societies helpless in the face of difficulties which could easily
have been solved several decades ago.

It
might be asserted that these are trivial psychological factors, which could be
changed if and when necessary. But it seems that these psychological factors cannot
be discarded even when it is necessary – it is, after all, so much
easier to deny the reality of the difficulties, simply to look the other way,
do something else...

*

On
the job problem-solving means having the best people doing the most important
jobs.

For
example, if it had not been Neil Armstrong at the controls of the first Apollo
11 lunar lander, but had instead been somebody of lesser ability, decisiveness,
courage and creativity – the mission would either have failed or aborted.

If
both the astronauts and NASA ground staff had been anything less than superb,
then the Apollo 13 mission would have led to loss of life.

But
since the 1970s there has been a decline in the quality of people in the key
jobs in NASA, and elsewhere – because organizations no longer seek to find and
use the best people as their ideal. They are not even trying to find the best
people.

What
do they do instead of trying to find
the best people? All sorts of things – for example they try to be ‘diverse’ in
various ways (age, sex, race, nationality etc).

And
also the people in the key jobs, even when they are the best people, are no
longer able to decide and command; due to the expansion of rules, committees
and the erosion of individual responsibility and autonomy.

*

By 1986, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, it was clear that humans
had declined in capability – since the disaster was fundamentally caused by
managers and committees being in control of NASA rather than individual
experts.

It
was around the 1970s that the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by
bureaucracy (although the trend had been growing for many decades).

Since
the mid-1970s the rate of progress has declined in physics, biology and the
medical sciences – and some of these have gone into reverse, so that the
practice of science in some areas has overall gone backwards, valid knowledge
has been lost and replaced with phony fashionable triviality and dishonest
hype.

Some
of the biggest areas of science – medical research, molecular biology,
neuroscience, epidemiology, climate research – are almost wholly trivial or
bogus. They have failed to deliver on a truly catastrophic scale.

Never
have so many resources have been expended with so little to show for it:
Stonehenge and the Pyramids may not do much, but at least they are still
there...

*

This
broad general failure in core objectives is not compensated by a few islands of
progress, e.g. in computerization and the invention of the internet.

Capability
must cover all the bases, psycho-social
as well as technical, and depends not on a single advanced area but all-round
advancement in all necessary areas.

Human capability then and now

The
fact is that human no longer do - can no longer do - many things we used
to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition
and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover
‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight
deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, suppress
piracy on the high seas...

50 years ago Western societies would aim to have the smartest, best trained,
most experienced and most creative people they could find (given human
imperfections) in position to take responsibility, make decisions and act upon
them in pursuit of a positive goal.

That
is what they were trying to do.

Now,
we are not even trying.

And
since we are not even trying to do the job, naturally the job will not be done.

*

Now
we have dull and docile committee members chosen partly with an eye to
affirmative action and partly to generate positive media coverage, whose major
priority is not to do the job but to avoid personal responsibility and prevent
side-effects and to build careers; pestered at every turn by an irresponsible
and aggressive media and grandstanding politicians out to score popularity
points; all of whom are hemmed-about by vast and proliferating regulations,
such that – whatever they do do, or do not do, whether they
succeed or fail – they will be in breach of some rule or another and vulnerable
to open-ended sanctions.

*

So
we should be honest about the fact that human do not anymore fly to the moon
because humans cannot anymore fly to the moon.

Also
noteworthy is that the deepest manned ocean descent of about 10.9 kilometres
into the Mariana Trench, was as long ago as 1960; and humans have never again
been as deep during the past half century.

Humans
have failed to prevent or suppress the re-emergence of high seas piracy on a
large scale because we nowadays cannot do it - although humans solved the
problem 150 years ago.

And
we cannot solve new problems either, since these require a combination
of attitudes and freedoms that we can no longer imagine, or which we fear more
than the problems themselves. In the past the average experts were both smarter
and more creative than we are now, and these experts would then have been in a
position to do the needful.

Measuring human capability: Moonshot
versus 'Texas Sharpshooter'

But
is the Moonshot really a valid measure of human capability?

Yes.
The reason that the Moonshot is a valid measure of human capability is that the
problem was difficult and was not chosen but imposed.

*

The
objective of landing men on the moon (and bringing them safely back) was not
chosen by scientists and engineers as being something already within their
capability – but was a problem imposed on them by politicians.

The
desirability of the Moonshot is irrelevant to this point. I used to be
strongly in favour of space exploration, now I have probably turned against it
– but my own views are not relevant to the use of the Moonshot as the ultimate
evidence of human capability.

Other
examples of imposed problems include the Manhattan Project for devising an
atomic bomb – although in this instance the project was embarked upon precisely
because senior scientists judged that the problem could possibly, maybe
probably, be solved; and therefore that the US ought to solve it first before
Germany did so.

But,
either way, the problem of building an atomic bomb was also successfully
solved.

Again,
the desirability of atomic bombs is not the point here – the point is that it
was a measure of human capability in solving difficult imposed problems.

*

Since
the Moonshot, there have been several difficult problems imposed by politicians
on scientists that have not been solved: such as finding a ‘cure for
cancer’ (or the common cold) and ‘understanding the brain’.

These
two problems had vastly more monetary and manpower resources (although vastly
less talent and creativity) thrown at them than was the case for either the Moonshot
or Manhattan Project.

But
modern technological advances are not imposed problems; they are instead
examples of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

*

The
joke of the Texas Sharpshooter is that he fires his gun many times into a barn
door, then draws a target over the bullet holes, with the bulls-eye over the
closest cluster of bullet holes.

In
other words the Texas Sharpshooter makes it look as if he had been aiming at
the bulls-eye and had hit it, when in fact he drew the bulls-eye only after
he took the shots.

Modern
science and engineering is like that. People do research and development, and
then proclaim triumphantly that whatever they have done is a breakthrough. They
have achieved whatever-happens-to-come-out-of-R&D; and then they spin, hype
and market whatever-happens-to-come-out-of-R&D as if it were a major
breakthrough.

In
other words, modern R&D triumphantly solves a retrospectively designated
problem, the problem being generated to validate
whatever-happens-to-come-out-of-R&D.

*

The
Human Genome Project was an example of Texas Sharpshooting masquerading as
human capability.

Sequencing
the human genome was not a matter of solving an imposed problem, nor any other
kind of real world problem, but was merely doing a bit faster what was
already happening.

*

Personally,
I am no fan of Big Science, indeed I regard the success of the Manhattan
Project as the beginning of the end for real science.

But
those who are keen that humanity solve big problems and who boast about our
ability to do so; need to acknowledge that humanity has apparently become much
worse, not better, at solving big problems over the past 40 years – so long as
we judge success only in terms of solving imposed problems which we do not
already know how to solve, and so long as we ignore the trickery of the many
Texas Sharpshooters among modern scientists and engineers.

The Texas Sharpshooter society of
secular modernity

As
I said, the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is a joke which suggests that the TS
fires his gun many times into a barn door, then afterwards draws a target over
the bullet holes.

But
the sharpshooter fallacy is nowadays unavoidable and everywhere, it
characterizes secular modern society throughout, because secular modern society
has no aim but instead idealizes process and retrofits aim to outcome.

Indeed,
the Texas Sharpshooter strategy is the master theory of our phase of late
modernity – the persuasion of people that whatever has happened is what they
wanted and what was intended.

*

Secular
moderns - in public discourse - 'believe in' things like freedom, or democracy,
or equality, or progress - but these are processes, not aims.

Aims
are not prescribed in advance and progress checked-against them – instead, aims
are retrospectively ascribed to whatever emerges from process.

In
this respect professional science is merely a typical aspect of modern life –
real science has been assimilated into mainstream contemporary life.

*

It
happens all the time: abolition of slavery emerged from the American Civil War
therefore people retrospectively ascribe liberation as its purpose. Destruction
of the death camps emerged from the second world war, so the liberation of the
Jews is ascribed as its purpose.

Libertarians
'believe in' freedom not as a means to some end, but as a process which by
definition leads to the best ends; so that they 'believe in' whatever comes out
of the process.

*

The
modern attitude is that the best thing is for science to be well funded and to
do what science does, and whatever comes out of the process of science is
retrospectively defined as 'truth'.

In
practice, science is defined as whatever scientists do, and what
scientists do is defined as generating truth.

Texas
Sharpshooter Fallacy...

*

Or
law. Law is a process, and justice is defined as that which results from the
process of law. Modern laws may feel revoltingly unjust; but lacking a
transcendental concept of justice, nothing more can be said. Justice is what
justice does.

TSF...

*

Or
education. What is education? The answer is ‘what happens at school and
college’. And whatever happens at school and college is what counts as
education. Since what happens at school and college changes, then the meaning
of education changes. But since education is not aiming at anything in
particular, it is merely ‘what happens at schools and colleges’, then these
changes cannot be evaluated. Whatever happens is retrospectively defined as
what needed to happen.

TSF...

*

Or
economics. Economic ‘growth’ is pursued as the good, and whatever comes out of
economics is defined as prosperity. What people 'want' is known only by what
they get - their wants are retrospectively ascribed. If what is being measured
and counted grows, then this is defined as growing prosperity. So the economy
fifty years ago wanted more A, B and C but the modern economy instead provides
X, Y and Z – however, economists retrospectively re-draw the target around X, Y
and Z and proclaim the triumph of economics. The economy did not provide ABC,
but this is taken to prove that ABC was not really wanted; instead the
economy provided XYZ which is taken to reveal people’s true
preferences.

TSF...

*

This is, of course, paradoxical; but it is not just paradoxical - it is nonsense.

The
primacy of process is simple nonsense – it is sleight-of-hand, it is
bait-and-switch. It is trying to do without aims because all aims point to the
necessity for underpinning justifications for those aims. Since modern society
regards clear and explicit aims as merely arbitrary and subjective statements, and
because aims (except when platitudinous) are divisive; it cannot agree on aims
and regards it as dangerous to try.

Secular
modernity is fundamentally (not accidentally, not reformably) based on the
Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and the fallacy is simple and obvious

However,
since the fallacy is intrinsic and pervasive, it must be concealed; and it is
concealed.

Since collapse happened to Classics,
it could happen to science

Since
professional science is not longer providing the breakthroughs in efficiency
that are necessary to sustain modernity, then modernity will collapse; we will,
in other words, return to the Malthusian Trap in which increasing population
will cause reducing standard of living (or violence or disease) until such a
point that the population has come into line with resources.

But,
before that point, it is probable (not definite) that professional science will
itself collapse – simply because it is on the one hand a waste of resources
(costs) and on the other hand these resources are needed for other purposes
(opportunity costs).

*

I
find that people simply cannot take seriously that Science would collapse down
to a small fraction of its current (vast, bloated) size. Despite that real
science is so recent, and is so fragile (so vulnerable to corruption) – people
assume that it must be eternal because it so useful.

But
why people imagine that something will survive merely because it is useful, in
the face of so many counter examples in their own experience of useful things
disappearing, is hard to fathom...

And
there is a recent precedent for the collapse of the dominant intellectual
culture: Classics.

*

The
study of Greek and Roman culture - language, history, literature, philosophy -
was the dominant secular intellectual activity in the West for many hundreds of
years and the teaching of Latin was at the core of the educational curriculum
for a couple of millennia.

Latin
was the mark of A Gentleman, especially A Scholar – Classics was the highest
status form of knowledge, the main (sometimes he only) subject taught at the best
schools and universities.

*

In
England, when it was the top country and culture, Classics pretty much
monopolized the curriculum in the Public Schools, Grammar Schools and Oxford
University (Cambridge focused on mathematics - but had plenty of Classicists
too). New subjects like Science, modern languages and modern history had to
fight for space in the curriculum.

Right up into the mid 20th century, the most prestigious general degree in
England was the Oxford four year Classics degree – it was the premier
'qualification' for elite ruling class professions.

The
'two cultures' debate of the late 1950s and early 1960s marked the tipping-point
when Science began to dominate Classics in general cultural discourse. Classics
more-or-less retained prestige for another generation, after which it very
suddenly collapsed, in the 1980s.

*

The
classics have now dwindled to the status of a hobby, taught in few schools and very
seldom given much prominence.

Most
UK universities have all-but abandoned the subject except at a ‘taster’ level -
only a handful of courses at a few places can find undergraduates with any
background or competence in Latin (even fewer in Greek); so most modern
'Classics' degrees are built on no foundations in three years; teaching from a
basis of zero knowledge.

Advocates
of Classics find it ever harder to justify their subject as worthy of study -
certainly there is no automatic deference towards it, no assumption of its
superiority.

*

So,
in the space of about 250 years, from the time of Samuel Johnson - when he was
apologetic about writing in English rather than Latin and focusing his
dictionary on the English vernacular - until now, Classics have dwindled from
unchallenged dominance to insignificance in general Western culture.

*

Classics
was quietly dwindling in cultural importance for a few hundred years (at least
since Shakespeare outstripped all rivals using the vernacular), and this was
becoming ever more apparent from the mid 19th century; but at least as recently
as the time of the great English Classics professor (and poet) Houseman
(1859-1936) it looked as if the subject was on the verge of a breakthrough
(using 'modern' scholarship).

And
of course classical scholarship has continued throughout all this decline,
pouring-out research books and scholarly articles for a dwindling audience of
other scholars.

But
despite all this, Classics has undeniably collapsed.

*

My
point is that if it seems unimaginable to many people that Science really could
collapse from dominance into insignificance in just a few decades, then these
people should think about what happened to Classics. The signs are there for
those who look behind the hype.

Of course a scientist feels that the real importance of Classics was trivial
compared with Science – that the modern world depends on Science.

Quite
true; but then the ancient world depended on Classics, and the collapse of
Classics was linked with the collapse of traditional society.

The collapse of Science is linked with the collapse of modernity - both as
cause and as consequence.

Chargaff on the loss of human pace
and scale in science

Referring
to his first twelve years at Columbia University, USA, Erwin Chargaff
(1905-2002) said:

“The more than sixty regular papers published during that period dealt with a
very wide field of biochemistry, as it was then understood; and a few of them
may even have contributed a little to the advance of science, which, at that
time, was still slow, i.e., it had human proportions... Nevertheless, when I
look back on what I did during those twelve years, there come to mind the words
ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas: Omnia quae scripsi paleae mihi videntur. All he
had written seemed to him as chaff.

“When
I was young, I was required – and it was easy – to go back to the origins of
our science. The bibliographies of chemical and biological papers often
included reference to work done forty or fifty years earlier. One felt oneself
part of a gently growing tradition, growing at a rate that the human mind could
encompass, vanishing at a rate it could apprehend.

“Now,
however, in our miserable scientific mass society, nearly all discoveries are
born dead; papers are tokens in a power game, evanescent reflections on the
screen of a spectator sport, new items that do not outlive the day on which
they appeared. Our sciences have become forcing houses for a market that in
reality does not exist, creating, with the concomitant complete break in
tradition, a truly Babylonian confusion of mind and language.

“Nowadays,
scientific tradition hardly reaches back for more than three or four years. The
proscenium looks the same as before, but the scenery keeps on changing as in a
fever dream; no sooner is one backdrop in place than it is replaced by an
entirely different one. The only thing that experience can now teach is that it
has become worthless.

“One
could ask whether a fund of knowledge, such as a scientific discipline, can
exist without a living tradition. In any event, in many areas of science which
I am able to survey, this tradition has disappeared. It is, hence, no
exaggeration and no coquettish humility if I conclude that the work we did
thirty or forty years ago – with all the engagement that honest effort could
provide – is dead and gone.”

Erwin
Chargaff – Heraclitean Fire, 1978.

*

From
this I note: “the advance of science … was still slow, i.e., it had human
proportions. … One felt oneself part of a gently growing tradition, growing at
a rate that the human mind could encompass, vanishing at a rate it could
apprehend.”

That is the pace of real science.

“…in
our miserable scientific mass society, nearly all discoveries are born dead;
papers are tokens in a power game, evanescent reflections on the screen of a
spectator sport, new items that do not outlive the day on which they appeared…”

In
contrast, the “miserable scientific mass society” of modern research does not
operate at the pace of real science, but at the pace of management.– Six
monthly appraisals, yearly job plans, three yearly grants and so on. All
evaluations being conducted and determined by committee and bureaucracy, by
votes and algorithms, according to check-box lists of objectives and outcomes -
rather than by individual judgment.

“Our
sciences have become forcing houses for a market that in reality does not
exist…”

Nobody
really wants what modern science provides, there is no real need
for it; which is why modern science is dishonest – from top to bottom: modern
science must engage in public relations, hype, spin – lies – in order to
persuade ‘the market’ that it really wants whatever stuff the ‘forcing houses’
of modern science are relentlessly churning-out.

“...honest
effort...”

A
two-word definition of real science.

Delbruck on the moral qualities of
science

Max
Delbruck - 1906-1981. Nobel Prize 1969

Question:
Does scientific research by itself foster high moral qualities in men?

Delbruck's
answer: "Scientific research by itself fosters one high moral quality:
that you should be reasonably honest. This quality is in fact displayed to a
remarkable extent. Although many of the things that you read in scientific
journals are wrong, one does assume automatically that the author at least
believed he was right."

Delubruck
was talking in 1971, forty years ago (a mere 40 years ago!) and he was one
of the most well-connected of twentieth century scientists, a kind of godfather
to molecular biology, and a man of great personal integrity.

So
Delbruck was in a position to know what he was talking about.

And,
in 1971, he was able to state that scientific research by itself fosters the
high moral quality that you should be reasonably honest. And that this quality
is in fact displayed to a remarkable extent.

And
that when reading journals scientists could and did assume that the authors
were telling the truth as they saw it.

Only
40 years ago Delbruck could state that scientists were in fact, in reality, in
practice - honest...

Nobody
of Delbruck’s integrity in Delbruck’s position could say the same today.

Micro-specialization and the infinite
perpetuation of error

Science,
real science, is itself a specialization of philosophy. After which science
itself specialized – at first into physical and natural sciences, and then into
ever-finer divisions.

Scientific
specialization is generally supposed to benefit the precision and validity of
knowledge within specializations, but at the cost of these
specializations becoming narrower, and loss of integration between
specializations.

In other words, as specialization proceeds, people supposedly know more and
more about less and less - the benefit being presumed to be more
knowledge within each domain; the cost that no single person has a
general understanding.

*

However,
I think that there is no benefit, but instead harm, from specialization beyond
a certain point – an imprecise but long-since-passed point.

Nowadays,
people do not really know more, even within their specialization – often
they know nothing validat all; almost everything they think they know
is wrong, because undercut by fundamental errors intrinsicand yet
invisible to that specialty.

The
clear cut benefits of specialization apply only to the early stages such
as the career differentiation in the early 20th century - the era when there
was a threefold division of university science degrees into Physics, Chemistry
and Biology.

It
is much less obvious that real science benefited from subdivision of each of these
into two or three (e.g. Physics into Theoretical and Applied, Chemistry into
Organic and Inorganic; Biology into Zoology and Botany).

But
since the 1960s scientific specialization has now gone far, far beyond this
point, and the process is now almost wholly disadvantageous.

We
are now in an era of micro-specialization, with dozens of subdivisions
within sciences. Biology, for example, fragmented into biochemistry, molecular
biology, genetics, neuroscience, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, cell
biology, marine biology, ecology...

*

Part
of this is simply the low average and peak level of ability, motivation and
honesty in most branches of modern science. The number of scientists has
increased by more than an order of magnitude – clearly this has an effect on
quality.

Scientific
training and conditions have become prolonged and dull and collectivist –
deterring creative and self-motivated people. And these changes have happened
in an era when the smartest kids tended not to gravitate to science, as they
did in the early 20th century, but instead to professions such as medicine and
law, and into the financial sector.

In
round numbers, it seems likely that more than ninety percent of modern
‘scientists’ are worse than the worst scientists of 60 years ago.

However
there is a more basic and insoluble problem about micro-specialization. This is
that micro-specialization is about micro-validation – which can neither detect
nor correct gross errors in its basic suppositions.

*

In the world of micro-specialization that is a modern
scientific career, each specialist’s attention is focused on technical minutiae
and the application of conventional proxy measures and operational definitions.
Most day-to-day research-related discussion (when it is not about fund-raising)
is troubleshooting – getting techniques and machines to work, managing
personnel and coordinating projects...

Specific
micro-specialist fields are built-around specific methodologies - for no better
ultimate reason than 'everybody else' does the same, and (lacking any real
validity to their activities) there must be some kind of arbitrary ‘standard’
against which people are judged for career purposes (judging people by
real scientific criteria of discovering truths is of course not done).

Thus,
micro-specialists are ultimately technicians and/or bureaucrats; thus they cannot
even understand fatal objections and comprehensive refutations of their
standard paradigms when these originate from adjacent areas of science. So long
as their own specific technique has been conducted according to prevailing micro-specialist
professional practice, they equate the outcome with ‘truth’ and assume its
validity and intrinsic value.

In
a nutshell, micro-specialization allows a situation to develop where the whole
of a vast area of science is bogus knowledge; and for this reality of total
bogosity to be intrinsically and permanently invisible and incomprehensible to
the participants in that science.

*

If
we then combine this situation with the prevalent professional research notion
that only micro-specialists are competent to evaluate the domain of
their micro-speciality – and add-in the continual fragmentation of research
into ever-smaller micro-specialties - then we have a recipe for permanent
and intractable error.

*

Vast
and exponentially-growing scientific enterprises have consumed vast resources
without yielding any substantive progress at the level of in-your-face common
sense evaluations; and the phenomenon continues for time-spans of whole
generations, and there is no end in sight (short of the collapse of
science-as-a-whole).

According
to the analysts of classical science, science was supposed to be uniquely
self-correcting - in practice, now, thanks in part to micro-specialization, it
is not self-correcting at all – except at the trivial and misleadingly
reassuring level of micro-defined technical glitches and slip-ups.

Either
what we call science nowadays is not 'real science' or else real science has
mutated into something which is a mechanism for the perpetuation of error.

The idea of science as a truth-machine

As
I survey the wondrous corruption of scientists, it seems that most of
them fall pretty soon into the obvious dishonesty of hype and spin, selection
and exaggeration.

But
not all do so; and among those decent scientists who strive to be honest while
pursuing a successful career I perceive an alternative pattern which is only
indirectly, and as it were accidentally dishonest: a pseudo-solution which unintentionally
makes matters worse, by camouflaging flagrant dishonesty and rejecting real
science.

It
is a strategy which is often pursued with high ideals, a clear conscience and
in a spirit of modesty, although it is in operation anti-scientific in spirit
and effect.

This
strategy is to replace honesty with precision, to replace truth-seeking with a
quest for technical accuracy.

*

Perhaps
the root of this error is the notion that there is such a thing as ‘scientific
method’ (detachable from the individuals who practice science); and that if
this scientific method is strictly adhered-to, then the result will be
valid science.

In
parody, this is the terribly mistaken view that science is a truth-machine:
the idea that if you do science properly then you will manufacture
‘truth’ reliably and cumulatively.

The
idea that if you perform observations and experiments according to the
approved principles, then this will lead to ‘facts’. And if you feed
these ‘facts’ into the correct analytical and statistical procedures (‘scientific
methodology’) then what comes out of the machine will be objective
truth.

The
idea that although the exact output may not precisely be known in advance, the process
by which valid outputs are generated is understood to be controllable, and
therefore it can confidently be predicted that the result of this
process will be valuable knowledge.

In
sum, this is the mainstream modern view that research input reliably leads
to real scientific output (albeit with varying degrees of efficiency).

(This
reasoning justifies the usual practice for measuring science by measuring inputs
– that is, measuring science by measuring how many resources - grants,
personnel, capital - are expended on supposedly-scientific goals. The
inputs are simply assumed to result in valid and relevant outputs of
knowledge so long as approved procedures are strictly followed.)

*

This
is, indeed the basic underlying ‘model’ for modern science, especially Big
Science – and it leads to the mainstream assumption that the constraint on
science is resources. The model assumes that – if you have research managers
who are deploying resources (manpower, machines etc) doing the right things -
then resources will be transformed into knowledge.

There
may be disagreement about the efficiency of this process, but the
assumption is very widely held that spending a lot of money on a problem will
accumulate knowledge towards its solution – so long as the researchers are
competent and rigorous (and that competence and rigour are themselves defined
as products of resources – i.e. educational and training resources).

Indeed,
rigour is a key word here – because rigour is defined in term of exact
adherence to predetermined method, technique, procedure – and this implies that
science ideally ought to be made wholly explicit, planned down to its finest
detail, and done in accordance with plans.

And
this is, indeed, the way that research funding is managed – ‘scientists’ are
compelled to submit detailed plans, which are approved or disapproved.

Science
is seen as a process of implementation, the process is seen as something
explicit and managed, and the role of the individual researcher is – in a
nutshell – obedience.

*

It
is obvious that this typically modern way of doing professional research –
based on the concept of research as a ‘truth-machine’ - bears zero relationship
to how real science was done in the past, during the golden age of science -
when science was small scale, individualistic, cheap, efficient and led to many
breakthroughs; and it is also obvious that this resource- and
organization-orientated way of doing research is derived not from science but
is instead the characteristic modus operandi of bureaucracies.

And
it is worth asking what evidence there is or was that scientific research would
be done better, valid knowledge better generated, in this bureaucratic fashion
than in the effective mode of the past?

And
the answer is equally obvious that there is no such evidence; but, on
the contrary, conclusive evidence that scientific research is done much worse
or not at all with this bureaucratic mode – less efficiently and less
effectively, indeed mostly done with zero or negative real world outcomes –
than when research was done as real science.

*

The
deep problem with a technical focus on rigour is that method is a means not
an end.

A
scientific problem does not dictate a specific method; indeed the solution to a
problem often comes from a new, non-obvious and unanticipated method; and the
solution to a problem is often best known exactly by the convergence of several
methods.

Furthermore,
methods are substantially constrained by manpower and technology (especially by
the development of machines, including computers), and a focus on method
becomes a race to assemble the largest teams and be the first to deploy the new
and ‘improved’ technology. Linked is the assumption that old technology and
methods are intrinsically unable to answer the questions. Whereas old technologies
and methods may well be able to answer the questions if creative
scientific genius is added to the mix – or even just sincere truth-seeking.

*

Yet,
as often as not, modern scientific ‘fields’ (research groups, appointments,
journals, conferences) are defined by their technologies. Presumably this is
helpful in terms of proximate goals - trouble-shooting methods; but destroys
the possibility of real science.

Real
science does not happen unless scientists are truth seekers and truth speakers,
and truth seeking is an end not a means – truth is not confined by methods; and
truth is a whole, not a part – an excess focus on one aspect is equivalent to
the gross exaggeration of one virtue at the expense of virtuous-ness.

So
factual technical rigour, being measurable, on the one hand obscures all other
forms of dishonesty– so that people who are not even trying to discover
or tell the truth but instead pursuing full-on careerism can nonetheless feel themselves
to be self-denying paragons of virtue due to their slavish and uncritical
submission to fashionable but arbitrary technical demands; while on the other
hand it also rejects real science as being insufficiently rigorous in terms of its
having lower precision in the approved technical domain.

And,
because science has been fragmented into micro-specialties, these errors are ineradicable
– there is no progress through self-correction, merely the fashion-driven
progression of new techniques.

Zombie science

Since
modern researchers have abandoned the core ethic of truth seeking, most
‘scientists’ are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas so long as they are
rewarded for doing so with sufficient career incentives.

The
primary criterion of the ‘validity’ of a modern research field is therefore, in
practice, the probability that working in it will be likely to benefit your
career.

*

Nowadays,
when a new idea is launched, it is unlikely to win converts unless
early-adopters are rewarded in an upfront and obvious fashion – typically with
incentives such as research funding, the opportunity to publish in prestigious
journals, and the promise of increased status exemplified by interest,
admiration and respect from other researchers.

This
is the currency of science – the tokens used to exchange for status, jobs,
salary, promotions, prizes...

Therefore new research fields and theories may with extraordinary rapidity
become popular and even dominant purely and simply because adoption is
reinforced by career incentives.

In
terms of the classical theory of science; worthless theories (e.g. theories
that are incoherent or fail to predict observations) should be demolished by
sceptical (or jealous) competitor scientists, who will denounce the weaknesses
of merely-fashionable theories in person, in conferences and (especially) in
print – in the scientific record, the ‘literature’.

However,
in practice it seems that even the most conclusive ‘hatchet jobs’ done on
phoney theories will fail to kill, or even weaken, them - when the phoney
theories are backed-up with sufficient career incentives. Scientists gravitate
to where the money is; and the paraphernalia of specialist conferences (to
present results at), journals (to publish in) and academic jobs (to work in)
will follow the money as night follows day; so long as the funding stream is
sufficiently strong, deep and sustained.

Classical
scientific theory has it that a wrong hypothesis will be rejected when it fails
to predict ‘reality’ as determined by controlled observations and experiments.
But such a catastrophe can be deferred almost indefinitely by the elaboration
of secondary hypotheses to explain why failing to fit the facts is not – after
all – fatal to the theory; but instead merely implies the need for a more
complex theory – which then requires further testing, and extra funding, and
generates more paid work for the bogus believers.

Furthermore,
since the new version of the bogus theory, with its many auxiliary secondary
hypotheses, is so complex – this complexity makes it that much harder to test;
indeed conclusive tests may become impossible, even in principle, since there
are no precise predictions. All of which has the effect of putting-off indefinitely
the time when a bogus theory needs to be abandoned.

(Meanwhile,
a much simpler rival theory – i.e. that the first theory is phoney, and always
was phoney, and this is why it so singularly fails to predict reality – is
regarded as simplistic, crass, merely a sign of lack of sophistication …)

*

After
a while, lavish funding creates powerful interest groups associated with the
phoney theory - including the reputations of numerous scientists who are now
successful and powerful on the back of the phoney theory, and who by-now
control the peer review process (including allocation of grants, publications
and jobs) so there is a powerful disincentive against upsetting the apple cart.
Indeed, the system of peer review sustains the phoney theory on the basis that
turkeys do not vote for Christmas.

What is the function of Zombie
science?

When
a branch of science based on incoherent, false or phoney theories is serving a
useful but non-scientific purpose it may be kept-going by continuous
transfusions of cash from those whose non-scientific interests it serves.

For
example, if a branch of pseudo-science based on a phoney theory is nonetheless
valuable for political purposes (e.g. to justify a government intervention such
as a new tax) or for marketing purposes (to provide the rationale for a
marketing campaign) then real science expires and a ‘zombie science’ evolves.

Zombie
science is science that is dead but will not lie down. It keeps
twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with your eyes
half-closed) zombie science looks much like real science. But in fact the
zombie has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant
pumping of funds.

*

Real science is coherent – and testable (testing being
a matter of checking coherence with the result of past and future observations).

Real
science finds its use, and gets its validation, from common sense evaluation
and being deployed in technology.

Real
science is validated (contingently) insofar as it leads to precise predictions
that later come true; and leads to new ways of solving pressing problems and
making useful changes in the world.

But
zombie science is not coherent, therefore cannot be tested; its predications
are vague or in fact retrospective summaries rather than predictions.

*

In
a nutshell, zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda;
trading on the prestige which real science used-to have and which zombie
science falsely claims for itself.

Zombie
science is deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public
administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media
generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses rhetorical attempts
to shape opinion.

Furthermore,
most zombie sciences are supported by moral imperatives – to doubt the zombie
science is therefore labelled as wicked, reckless, a tool of sinister and
destructive forces.

To
challenge zombie science is not merely to attack the livelihoods of zombie
scientists (which, considering their consensus-based power, is itself
dangerous) – but opens the attacker to being labelled a luddite, demagogue,
anti-science, a denialist!

For
all its incoherence and scientific worthlessness, zombie science therefore often
comes across in the sound bite world of the mass media as being more
plausible than real science; and it is precisely the superficial
face-plausibility which in actuality is the sole and sufficient purpose of
zombie science.

The expectation of growth in
scientific knowledge

We
have become used to growth in scientific knowledge, and have come to expect
growth in scientific knowledge – scientific progress.

This
expectation in scientific progress at first shaped reality and eventually
displaced reality.

The
link between expectation and actuality was broken and the world of assumptions
took over.

*

The
expectation that scientific knowledge will grow almost inevitably (given
adequate 'inputs' of personnel and funding) is epitomized by the
professionalization of scientific research (making scientific research a career,
then making research jobs part of a bureaucracy) and the normal career expectation
of regular and frequent and measurable outputs – especially research publications.

The
expectation of regular and frequent research publication would only make sense
if it was assumed that scientific knowledge was accumulating in a predictable
fashion.

*

Because
of what happened in the past, we nowadays expect an open-ended growth in the
number of scientific publications over time, and a growth in the totality of
citations (references to previous research).

These
quantitative increases are at bottom fuelled by increases in the numbers of
professional scientists which drives the number of journals for publishing
science.

According
to analysis by Michael Mabe, each researcher generates approximately one-paper-per-year
(controlling for number of authors per paper); and this has not changed
significantly over the decades.

Leaving
aside quality – it seems that the expansion of scientific publication and the
growth in journals is merely a consequence of the expansion of manpower.

*

By
assuming that growth in researchers and publications will continue, we implicitly
assume that there is an unbounded quantity of new and useful science waiting to
be discovered and an unrestricted pool of people capable of making discoveries.

The
economist Paul Romer – and others – built this into theories of the modern
economy – the argument is that continued growth in science and technology fuels
continual improvement in productivity (economic output per person) and
therefore growth in the economy. Some of this economic growth is invested into
science (education and employment of personnel and capital equipment) to drive
further economic growth.

The
idea is that we are continually getting better at scientific discovery, because
we are continually investing more in scientific discovery, therefore
modern society is enabled to continue economic growth – pretty much forever...

*

Plausibility
aside, how would we know whether real science was growing? (Useful new
science, that is, as contrasted with the mere volume of publications and other
communications – which is simply a matter of words, pictures and numbers.)

Who could evaluate whether change is real science not hype; and whether
increased amounts of self-styled scientific stuff (publications,
personnel, laboratories etc.) actually corresponded to more and better real science?

Why
should the default assumption be that increased size of science as a
professional activity corresponds to increased knowledge?

*

When
scientific growth is expected, and when society acts-upon the expectation, we
have an overwhelming assumption of growth in science, an assumption that science
is growing – but that assumption says nothing at all about whether there
really is growth.

Indeed,
so strong is the assumption that science is progressing that we have a
situation where a critic of science is expected to prove the negative - that
science is not growing. This is remarkable – instead of scientists and
the funders of science having to prove that they are making progress we
have a situation where the progress is assumed (unless proven otherwise).

We
have a situation where every scientific publication (once it has been
published) is nowadays presumed to be valid (unless proven otherwise).

This
was not always the case! – to put it mildly.

*

One
reason people assume an increase of knowledge is that modern science has been
‘peer reviewed’ before publication – that is to say a virtual-committee of
other scientists have – if not exactly approved it, then at least not vetoed
its publication, based on their opinions of its quality.

However,
what the opinion of a bunch of self-styled scientists has to do with validity
is never explained – since real science was supposed to be about
something more than opinion; indeed being about more than mere opinion was precisely
what supposedly made science science!

Yet
since we are in a situation when, apparently, published science is assumed to
be valid (until proven otherwise), and in a situation when publication depends
on an opinion poll (i.e. peer review) – then ‘science’ of this kind is no more
valid than any other opinion poll.

*

The
situation is that a bunch of senior researchers in each research specialty (the
peer review cartel) are assuring the outside-world that yes – research
volume is in fact the same as knowledge volume. And since research volume is a
product of research input, the conclusion is obvious: give us more money!

*

When people assume real science is growing, and when they think they
perceive from output volume that real science is growing, this creates vast
possibilities for dishonesty, hype and spin.

Because
people are expecting science to grow, and expecting there to be regular
breakthroughs, they tend to believe it when regular breakthroughs are claimed
(whether or not breakthroughs have actually happened).

Indeed,
if the breakthroughs are not obvious – then breakthroughs will be looked for
until breakthroughs are ‘found’.

(The
same happens with genius – if there are no modern geniuses to compare with the
scores of geniuses observable 100 years ago – then this is assumed to mean that
we need to look harder for the geniuses which we just know must be
there...)

*

But
how if there is really no growth in scientific knowledge – but merely growth in
scientific communications?

How
if there is actual decline in real scientific knowledge – how would we
know this from outputs?

We
wouldn’t. We would only know it from declining capability. And declining
capability, as argued above, we do seem to observe.

Doing real science is hard

A
thought experiment: Let us suppose that doing real science is actually much harder
than most people currently assume; much slower, more difficult and less
predictable.

*

Suppose
that most competent and hardworking real scientists actually make no
indispensable and distinctive contribution to real science – none at all -
but merely incremental improvements, minor checks or refinements in methods,
the precision of measurements and the expression of theories.

And
if they personally had not done it, it would have slightly-slowed but would not
have prevented progress: or somebody else would have done it.

And
that it is simply the nature of real science that unpredictability, riskiness,
is intrinsic. That there are no guarantees that even able and
hardworking scientists will actually achieve anything at all.

Indeed
suppose that the likeliest outcome is that most scientists – most real
scientists - will turn-out to have been redundant, superfluous, and unnecessary
– yet this outcome can be known only in retrospect. We cannot predict who will
succeed and who will fail.

And
of course all this is not a thought experiment – it is a simple
statement of fact: real science is really hard.

(Ask
any real scientist.)

*

Since
real science is really hard, then this fact is incompatible with the
professionalization of science – with the idea of scientific research as a
career.

Since
real science is irregular and infrequent and unpredictable, then science could
only be done in an amateur way; maybe as a sideline from some other
profession like teaching, practicing medicine, being a priest, or as a hobby
for the wealthy – or supported by a patron.

Professional
science would then be regarded as an activity intrinsically phoney; and
the phoniness would increase as professionalization of science increased and
became more precisely measured, and as the profession of science expanded –
until it reached a situation where the visible products and evidence of science
(publications, personnel, buildings, organizations and their funding) – the stuff
bore zero relationship to the reality of science.

Professional
scientists would produce stuff (like scientific publications) regularly and
frequently, but this stuff would actually have nothing to do with real science.

Nothing to do with real science.

*

Or,
more exactly, the growing amount of stuff produced by the growing numbers of
professional science careerists, whose use of hype would also be growing – the
amount of this stuff would be so much greater than the amount of
real science, that any real science would be obscured utterly.

*

This
is precisely what we have.

The
observation of growth in scientific knowledge became an expectation of growth
in science and finally an assumption of growth in science.

And
when it was being assumed that science was growing, the amount of real science
did not really need to grow, because the assumption that it was growing framed
the reality.

*

But
if real science is as hard (slow, unpredictable, uneven) as was always
believed (until the mid 20th century); then scientific progress
cannot be taken for granted, cannot be expected or assumed.

Yet
our society depends on scientific progress – if or when scientific
progress stops, our society will soon collapse, because it will not grow – and
our society depends on growth.

Despite,
or maybe because, science is vital to our survival as a civilization, so great
is our societal arrogance that we do not regard science as something real.

Instead
we have made scientific progress a matter of casual assumption, not of serious observation;
hence scientific progress has become the subject of unbounded wishful thinking
and deceitful propaganda.

When the bubble bursts

Real
science is a way of getting at certain kinds of truth, but the way that science
works is absolutely dependent on honesty and integrity. Our societal arrogance
is such that we believe that we can have the advantages of real science
but at the same time subvert the honesty and integrity of science
whenever that happens to be expedient.

We
act as if real science can necessarily be formalised, mechanised and made a
process of mass production. And we don’t even attempt to check whether this is true.

Our
societal arrogance is that we are in control of this dishonesty – that the
amount of hype and spin we apply to science is under our control, trivial in
its effect, and can be undone at will; that we can separate the signal of honest
real science from the noise of mass produced ‘research’- and ‘back-calculate’
or reverse-engineer the truth of science from the lies and exaggerations of
careerist research...

*

But
in fact we have no idea of the real situation in science, no idea of the
quantity or identity of valid knowledge, except that in a system tending
towards entropy (bias, selectivity, inaccuracy) we must assume that the noise
will tend to grow and swamp the signal.

Science
has appeared to be growing, but the only sure and dependable reality is
increasing hype, spin and dishonesty.

The
link between scientific stuff and scientific substance has disappeared.

*

In
sum: when the signals of science (‘publications’ or other research communications
including spoken words) lose their meaning, when the meaning of science is
detached from underlying reality, then there is no limit to the mismatch.

Not
knowing the truth, the mismatch between truth and un-truth becomes un-measurable
– there may be zero correlation between communications and reality.

Scientific
communications and underlying reality can be two separate and independent
domains. Which explains how real science is collapsing while professional research
outputs are booming.

*

The
amount of real science (intermittent, infrequent, unpredictable) has surely not
stayed absolutely constant throughout this inflationary process - but
will surely have declined due to the environment for real science
becoming increasingly hostile.

So,
what we call ‘science’ is an inflating bubble, just skin on gas, and inflating bubbles
eventually burst.

And
the longer delayed the burst, the bigger the bubble will become (the more gas,
the less substance), and the bigger will be the explosion.

*

When
the scientific bubble bursts, what will be left over after the explosion?

Maybe
only old science will prove valid – science from an era when most
scientists believed in objective reality and that it was their vocation to
discover it; when most scientists were honest and trying to speak the truth –
as they understood it - about the natural world.

And
from an era when, if scientists had nothing to say for a few years then they
said nothing for a few years; when, indeed, if scientists discovered little or
nothing then these scientists would state candidly that they had discovered
little or nothing.

How
far would we need to go back? About two generations or fifty years I should say
– to before the mid nineteen sixties, and maybe more...

*

But,
in an era of micro-specialization, will there be anyone who can even understand
old/ real science, leave aside the problem of finding anyone who can actually do
real science in the old way?

Scientific validity is about
coherence not testing

The
problem with science is a problem of validity. Real science had robust
(although not infallible) ways of establishing validity; modern professional
research cannot establish validity, because it does not recognise any
transcendent reality beyond the opinion of ‘scientists’.

To
be more exact, modern professional research has methods which are
regarded as intrinsically providing validation – but the methods are themselves
unvalidated – indeed the methods used to assert validity are no more than
arbitrary conventions enforced by power.

*

Until
recently, I usually described real science as being mostly a matter of devising
theories which had implications, and testing these implications by observation
or experiment.

In
other words, science was supposedly about making and testing predictions,
devising theories and doing observations and experiments to test them.

This
‘classic’ view of science is often described as Popperian, being (broadly) based
on the work of philosopher Karl Popper – for example in the title of one of his
books: Conjectures and refutations.

*

Of
course there is more which needs to be said to give a sufficient account of
Popper’s ideas: the predictions must derive from theory, and predictions should
be sufficiently complex or non-obvious or counter-intuitive, so as to be
unlikely to happen by random chance. And so on.

But
it is now clear that this sequence doesn’t happen much nowadays, if it ever
did.

And,
indeed, that there are serious weaknesses about the conceptualization of
science as mostly a matter of testing predictions – since this process turns
out to be circular – once validation is merely a matter of peer review, of
consensus.

*

The
main problem is that when science becomes big, as it is now, the social
processes of science come to control all aspects of science, including
defining whatcounts as a test of a prediction and what counts
as passing that test.

Testing
now boils-down to the social processes of science, merely.

This
means peer review = a poll of opinions = government by committees (some
actual committees, meeting in a room; some merely virtual committees with
participants distributed across time and space). Therefore the validation
process is made consensual, and disconnected from any notion of testing putative
knowledge in relation to reality.

*

Yet,
the problem is therefore not so much at the level of testing – but is at root a
problem of coherence,

There
can be no ‘testing’ without coherence. Without coherence there is, indeed, nothing
to test.

*

Incoherent
theories do not have tightly-defined implications and cannot make precise
predictions, therefore there is no conceivable way in which they could be put
to a test.

So...
incoherent theories cannot be tested, and most theories in modern
research are incoherent (in so far as they are even articulated – there are
branches of science operating under the delusion that they do not have any
theory), and modern careerist pseudo-science is powerfully resistant to any
attempt to create coherence.

When
theories are incoherent, hence un-testable, therefore false science can
never be refuted. The process of (supposedly) ‘testing’ is one that never
ends; nothing can ever be put to a conclusive test, therefore nothing is ever
conclusively refuted.

Incoherent
‘science’ is not even false. Therefore incoherent science can be kept
going ad infinitum – whether it is true or not. From a careerist
perspective, therefore, the incoherence of science may be a feature, not a bug.

Science as a sub-species of
philosophy

Science
is a child of philosophy, and as in philosophy, the basic ‘test’ of science is
coherence.

Statements
in science ought to cohere with other statements in science, and this
ought to be checked.

Testing
‘predictions’ by observation and experiment is merely one type of checking
for coherence. ‘Testing’ is, in fact, merely checking for coherence between
the predictions of a coherent theory and observations.

This
process need not involve a temporal sequence, there no need for prediction to
precede the observation testing that prediction, since ‘predictions’ are
(properly) not to do with time but with logic.

Testing
in science ought not, therefore, to focus on predictions such as ‘I predict now
that x will happen under y circumstances in the future’ – but instead the focus
should be – much more simply – on checking that the various statements of
science cohere in a logical fashion.

*

To
put it another way: It is an axiom that all true scientific statements are
consistent with all other true scientific statements.

True
statements should not contradict one another, they should cohere.

In
order that coherence not be vacuous, statements must be sufficiently precise in
their implications (implications being another word for ‘predictions’).

So
that when it is discovered that there is no logical coherence between two
scientific propositions (two theories, 'facts' or whatever), and assuming the
reasoning process is sound, then one or both propositions must be wrong.

*

Real
scientific work is the process of making and learning about propositions.

A
newly made proposition that is not coherent with a bunch of previously existing
propositions may nonetheless be true, because all or some of the previously
existing propositions may be false.

Indeed
that is one meaning of a scientific revolution – a revolution is what happens when
a new proposition succeeds in overturning a bunch of old coherent propositions,
and establishing a new network of coherent propositions: a different set of
propositions, coherent on a different basis.

This
is always a work in progress, and at any moment there is considerable
incoherence in science which is being sorted-out – or, at least, that is the
usual assumption.

*

The
fatal flaw in modern science is that there is no such sorting-out.

Incoherence
is ignored, propositions are merely piled loosely together and the
result is called a theory.

Or
the revelation of incoherence is eluded, rather than sorted-out, by the process
of micro-specialization and the creation of isolated little worlds within-which
there may be coherence, but between-which there is zero coherence (and no attempt to check
or impose coherence).

No such thing as ‘Science’ anymore

Using
this very basic requirement of coherence, it is obvious that much of modern
science is not science because it is incoherent – its theories do not make
sense, or are obviously wrong.

And
furthermore there no coherence between the specialties of research –
specialties are not checked against each other. Indeed such checks between
specialties are often regarded as impossible – on the basis that different
scientific specialties are seen as incommensurable (i.e. not measurable
against a common standard).

It
is not that the propositions of modern professional research are checked and
fail the checks, but that no attempt whatsoever is made to check for
coherence between specialities. Insofar as any need for coherence between
micro-specialisms is acknowledged, the actual business of checking is endlessly
deferred...

Indeed,
some philosophies of science have evolved to rationalize the endless deferral
of checking for cohesion between specialisms; and there is a big literature in
the philosophy of science which purports to prove that different types of science
are incommensurable, incomparable, and independent – hence cannot meaningfully
be checked against one another.

This
implies that there is no unit of scientific validity greater than the
micro-specialty. This implies that each micro-specialty (with its narrow
selection of foundational assumptions and methods stands alone. This implies
that there is no such thing as ‘Science’ and that the individual
scientific specialty is the largest possible unit of coherence.

*

If
this is true, and it is true in the sense that nobody has even tried to
demonstrate coherence across and between the ‘scientific’ research specialities
- then science as a whole does not add-up.

In
other words, there are only the hundreds of microspecialist ‘sciences’ that
cast no light on one another, are irrelevant to each other, do not constrain
each other.

This
means in turn that all the different micro-specialties that now constitute
‘science’ would not be contributing to anything greater than themselves
considered individually.

This
means that, formally speaking, there is no such thing as Science only
hundreds of ‘sciences’– ‘Science’ is merely an arbitrary collection, a loose
heap of micro-specialties each yielding autonomous micro-knowledge of
unknowable applicability, and the whole given the honorific title of ‘Science’.

*

This is very obviously true of modern medical science and biology. For example the
massive specialism of ‘neuroscience’ does not add-up to anything like
‘understanding’ of the brain or nervous system – it is merely a collection of
hundreds of autonomous micro-specialties and factoids about nervous tissue. Observations
of this, then of that, then of something else – pile ‘em high and call it
neuroscience!

These
micro-specialties were not checked for consistency with each other at
any point, and as a consequence they are not consistent with each other.
Neuroscience was not conducted with an aim of creating a coherent body
of knowledge, and as a result it is not a coherent body of knowledge.

‘Neuroscience’, as a term (it is not a concept, does not rise anywhere close
to being a concept) is merely an excuse for funding a vast heap of mutual irrelevance.

*

It
is not a matter of whether the micro-specialties in modern science are correct
observations (in the past they probably were honest, nowadays they are quite
likely to be dishonest). But that isolated observations – even if honest - are
worthless.

It is only when observations and specialties are linked with others (using
theories) that consistency can even potentially be checked, whether or not it actually
is checked; only then that understanding might arise - and then ‘predictions’
can potentially emerge.

Checking
science for its coherence includes testing predictions, and maximizes both the
usefulness and testability of science; but a science based purely on testing
predictions (and ignoring coherence) will become both incoherent and trivial.

Real
science is first coherent, then its coherence is deliberately checked –
sometimes (not always) by testing.

But
modern research is incoherent, and therefore whatever masquerades as checking and
testing is not merely irrelevant but actively misleading – merely an excuse for
unending funding of permanently inconclusive research.

Doing science because science is fun?

Committed
scientists in recent decades have often justified themselves in the face of
increasing careerism, fragmentation, incoherence and dishonesty by emphasizing
that doing-science (being ‘a scientist’) is enormous fun – and that this
is their main motivation for doing it.

*

Although
understandable, this is a foolish and indeed desperate line of defence.
Many things are 'fun' for the people who happen to like them, but fun or
not-fun, science was supposed to be about reality.

And Hitler, Stalin and Mao seemingly enjoyed being dictators, and redefining
‘truth’ for their own purposes by the exercise of their power to do so. Perhaps
they found all this ‘fun’ – but does that justify them? Maybe torturers find their
work fun?

Crosswords,
reading romantic novels, getting-drunk, chatting with friends – all these may
be fun, may indeed be a lot more fun (or, at least, easier fun) than
science; but does that justify making them into lifelong careers and spending
trillions of dollars on their support and subsidy?

That
it may be fun does not justify science.

*

Plus
of course science is not fun anymore: because being a minor bureaucrat
and filling-in forms with lies is not fun (or if it is, the fun is not science);
planning your work in detail for the next three years then rigidly sticking to
the plan is not fun; being forbidden to do what interests you but forced to do
what is funded is not fun; spending your time discussing grants instead of
ideas is not fun...

Real science done for vocational reasons is (or can
be) fun (more exactly, it is profoundly satisfying); but pursuing a modern
research career is not science and is not fun.

A
modern research career may be rewarding in terms of money, power, status,
lifestyle and the like, or sustained by the hope of these – but is not something
done for its intrinsic fun-ness.

*

Of course the ‘science is fun’ line of argument is mostly trying to avoid the
‘science is useful’ trap.

The
usefulness trap must be avoided because the application of science is something
intrinsically unknowable. Science is about discovering reality – and knowing
this may or may not be useful, may be beneficial or it might well turn out to
be harmful – indeed fatal; so usefulness cannot be guaranteed.

*

At
least usefulness cannot be guaranteed if youare being honest –
although modern researchers seldom are honest, hence they often do claim that
science is predictable, useful and intrinsically beneficial.

(Indeed,
in the UK, all government and government-tainted sources of funding require
that a successful applicant must make the case that their research is indeed
useful and intrinsically beneficial. In other words, the applicant for these
sources of money mustlie in order to be successful. All
recipients of such resources are demonstrable liars.)

Modern
researchers also sometimes pretend that their kind of science is ‘fun’ – yet
what they are doing is not science, and what they are getting ‘fun’ from is
other stuff entirely: such as the business of trying to get famous, powerful,
rich – enjoying the lifestyle of conferences, gossip and intrigue...

*

So
real vocational science is ‘fun’ in the sense of personally rewarding, but this
does not justify real science; and almost all of what currently gets called
science is neither real nor fun.

After science

The
classic science fiction novel A canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller
portrays a post-nuclear-holocaust world in which the tradition of scientific
practice – previously handed-down from one generation of scientists to the next
– has been broken. Only a few scientific artefacts remain, such as fragments of
electronic equipment.

It
turns out that ‘after science’, scientific objects and records make no sense
and are wildly misinterpreted. A blueprint is regarded as if it was an
illuminated manuscript, diodes are regarded as lucky talismans.

Modern ‘science’ has entered a similar state in which the artefacts of science
remain – such as places called universities, the academic hierarchy, white
coats, laboratory organization, expensive tools and machines, statistical
methods, and the peer review mechanism – but understanding of what these mean
has been lost.

*

A
theme associated with philosophers such as the Michaels Polanyi and Oakeshott
is that explicit knowledge – such as is found in textbooks and scientific
articles – is only a selective summary that omits that the most important
capability derives from implicit, traditional or ‘tacit’ knowledge.

It
is this un-articulated knowledge – embedded in traditions, habits, practices - that
leads to genuine human understanding of the natural world, accurate prediction
and the capacity to make effective interventions.

What
is being transmitted and inculcated is an over-arching purpose, a style of
thought, a learned but then spontaneous framing of reality, a sense of how
problems should be tackled, and a gut-feeling for evaluating the work or
oneself, as well as others.

This
kind of process was in the past achieved by such means as familial vocations,
prolonged apprenticeship, co-residence, and extended time spent in association
with a Master – and by the fact that the Master and apprentice personally
selected each other.

The
Master-apprentice pattern was seen in all areas of life where independence,
skill and depth of knowledge were expected: crafts, arts, music, scholarship –
and science.

*

Although
such methods sound a bit mysterious, not to say obscurationist, to modern ears
– in fact they are solid realism and common sense.

Such
methods for ensuring the transmission of subtle knowledge recognize the gulf
between on the one hand being able to do something, and on the other
hand knowing how you have done it; and the further gap between knowing
how you have done something, and being able to teach it by explicit and
free-standing instructions.

Such
systems as apprenticeship recognize that the most important aspects of
knowledge may be those which are not known or understood to be the most
important, or may even be in opposition to that which is believed or supposed
to be important.

Many
things can (tacitly) be learned that cannot (explicitly) be taught.

*

The
educational ‘method’ was that an apprentice should spend a lot of time with the
Master in many situations; and as for educational evaluation, the best way for
a Master to know that his skill really has been passed-on, is for him to spend
a lot of time with the apprentice in many situations.

Imperfect
as it inevitably was, inefficient as it seems; nonetheless traditions were
as a matter of observable fact maintained and often improved over centuries by
means of apprenticeship – which was regarded as the safest and surest way of
ensuring that the knowledge and skills could be sustained and developed.

However,
modern priorities are different. The preservation and development of high-level
human skills and expertise is no longer regarded as a priority, something to
which many other concerns will inevitably need to be subordinated.

And
the ‘Master–apprentice’ model of education - which works, and which
stretches back in human history as far as we know - has been all-but discarded
from science (and much of mainstream culture) over recent decades.

*

Indeed
the assumptions have now been reversed.

The
discarding of traditions of apprenticeship and prolonged human contact in
science was not due to any new discovery that apprenticeship was – after all –
unnecessary, let alone that the new bureaucratic systems of free-standing
explicit aims and objectives, instructions, summaries and lists of core
knowledge and competencies, tick-boxes and numerical rating etc. were superior
to apprenticeship.

Yet
there is nothing to suggest that these bureaucratic processes are remotely the
equal of apprenticeship: indeed there is nothing to suggest that they work at
all.

Rather,
the Master–apprentice system has been discarded despite the overwhelming
evidence of its superiority; and has been replaced by the growth of
bureaucratic regulation.

*

The
main reason for discarding apprenticeship is probably that scientific manpower,
personnel or ‘human resources’ (as they are now termed) have expanded vastly and
quickly over the past 60 years – probably about ten-fold.

There
was, indeed, zero possibility of such rapid and sustained quantitative
expansion being achieved using the labour-intensive apprenticeship methods of
the past.

The
tradition of apprenticeship was therefore discarded because it stood in the
path of the expansion of scientific manpower. Stood, that is to say, in the
path of an expansion of the power of leading scientists – who in this
process evolved from being real scientists into professional research managers.

The
choice was between either maintaining the ethos and skills of real science, or
else going ahead with the rapid and large scale expansion of research manpower.

The
choice that was made was to discard the ethos and skills of science.

*

It
has now become implicitly accepted among the mass of professional ‘scientists’
that the decisions which matter most in science are those imposed upon science
by outside forces: by employers (deciding who gets the jobs, who gets
the promotion), funders (deciding who gets the big money), editors and
publishers (deciding who gets their work published in the big journals),
bureaucratic regulators (deciding who gets allowed to do what work), and the
law courts (deciding whose ideas get backed-up, or criminalized, by the courts)
– and of course politicians (deciding the framework within which all these
others operate).

It
is these bureaucratic mechanisms that constitute ‘real life’ and the ‘bottom
line’ for modern research practice.

The
tradition has been broken.

*

We
are living After Science, in the same
fashion and for similar reasons that philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre recognized
(in his 1981 book of that title) that we are living After Virtue.

Modern
science is in that post-holocaust situation described in A Canticle for
Liebowitz – the transmission of tacit knowledge has been broken; we have a
simulacrum of science but not the reality.

The
destruction of real science was concealed by the escalation of hype and spin, thus
science was gradually rebuilt as a Potemkin Village: a superficially-impressive
façade of pseudo-knowledge concealing a morass of corrupt bureaucracy and
mediocre careerism.

Real science in one sentence

If
you are truthful, and spontaneously motivated to spend a lot of time and effort
thinking-about and investigating something, then there is a
reasonable chance, but no guarantee, that you will discover something.

Origins of this book

The
origins of this book lie in my childhood idealisation of science and its
continuation as an ideal well into middle age – and the inexorable dismantling
of this ideal by accumulated experience.

What
kind of experience?

At
first it was noticing that scientists were seldom doing the best work of which
they were capable, and becoming aware of their reluctance to take risks or be
long-termist in pursuit of scientifically-ambitious work (their preference for
high and reliable outputs of mediocre and unimportant work over the smaller
chance of major work).

That
was dismaying. But primarily it was the experience of non-honesty (that is, indifference
to honesty) that did for me; the observation that non-honesty was rewarded in
career terms.

And
finally encountering the systematic imposition of non-honesty; not only indirectly
by rewarding hype, spin, fashionable
incompetence and lies; but eventually directly by the punishment of honesty.

*

Modern
scientists are not merely expected to be routinely dishonest when this is
expedient (e.g. for career reasons, for the convenience of professional
colleagues, for personal and institutional funding etc.); but scientists are
now actually forbidden to be truthful all the time and about everything.

Of
course, the process is concealed by words, is reframed in apparently more
acceptable ways – but I invite anyone who doubts what I say actively to try
actively practicing science with scrupulous
honesty - honesty, that is, in all matters scientific: even in
applications for grants, jobs, promotions, tenure, the presentation of research
‘plans’, research assessment exercises, press releases and so on. Honest in
everything.

Any
such individual will almost certainly be confronted with serious problems and
intense pressures within one month, probably much sooner.

*

This
book is based on one person’s knowledge and experience, and is thereby limited
in many ways. For example, I do not travel much and have not been to many
conferences.

On
the other hand, I have worked across an unusually wide range of bioscience and
medicine; and for seven and a half years I solo-edited (i.e. no peer review) a
large, monthly journal of ideas - international in scope and with very
broad-based bioscience content.

I
have also known several outstanding real scientists (in the physical sciences,
as well as the biosciences and medicine), and some experts in the conduct of
real science.

Still,
whatever may be their limitations, my knowledge and experience are at any rate wide
enough and deep enough to draw general conclusions; especially when
corruption in science is so very common and so very obvious.

You
don’t need to be much of a marksman to hit a barn door at five paces...

Further reading and references

The
fact that I have not referenced the text of this book comes partly from
idleness, partly from the desire to make the reading experience more enjoyable;
but mostly from my intention – or at least hope – of opening eyesto
the obvious, of clarifying the already-known -rather than
persuading by weight of (supposed) facts.

(If
you need persuading, then you cannot be persuaded.)

Evidence
of the corruption of science, its endemic dishonesty, is all around us and
everywhere we look – we need merely to allow the scales to fall from our eyes,
need merely to remove our blinkers.

To
pick-up and examine specific items of dishonesty is merely to diminish
the impact of the overwhelming whole by arbitrary, piecemeal and detached
consideration.

*

Nonetheless
in the past I have tried to do exactly this – to document the corruptions of
modern ‘science’ with referenced papers.

So,
for those who want ‘evidence’, here is a list of my previous publications on
themes covered by this book, some of them statistical and historical, replete
with a wide range of references to further literature.

All
these publications have myself as single author except where otherwise
indicated:

·First a hero of science and now a martyr to science:
The James Watson Affair - Political correctness crushes free scientific
communication. Medical Hypotheses 2008; 70: 1077-1080.

·Charlton BG, Andras P. 'Down-shifting' among top UK
scientists? - The decline of 'revolutionary science' and the rise of 'normal
science' in the UK compared with the USA. Medical Hypotheses 2008; 70:
465-472.

·Charlton B Andras P. Best in the arts, catching-up in
science – what is the best future for Oxford? Oxford Magazine 2006; 256:
25-6.

·Charlton BG, Andras P. The future of 'pure' medical
science: the need for a new specialist professional research system. Medical
Hypotheses. 2005; 65: 419-25.

·Charlton BG, Andras P. Medical research funding may
have over-expanded and be due for collapse. Quarterly Journal of Medicine.
2005; 98: 53-5.

Selected sources and acknowledgments

Bronowski,
Jacob (1908-1974)

Jacob
Bronowski came to my attention when I was fourteen years old, with his
stunningly brilliant and heartfelt 1973 television documentary series The
Ascent of Man. This built-upon a vague childhood interest in science to
‘convert’ me to ‘humanism’ – the religion of science as the engine and essence
of human progress. Afterwards I read and re-read pretty much everything
Bronowski ever wrote, but especially The Common Sense of Science (1951)
and Science and Human Values (1956). I would now regard Bronowski as an
(intrinsically un-replicable) transitional figure between science based
in orthodox religiousness and careerist research derived from modern nihilism.
Bronowski was raised a Jew and later became a militant atheist – but always retaining
his inculcated religious devotion to transcendental values (especially truth but
also beauty). Despite later divergences, I retain from Bronowski the critical
insight that science depends utterly on ‘the habit of truth’ – that
truthfulness is non-optional, an iron law.

Calne,
Roy Yorke

From
conversation and reading his autobiography The Ultimate Gift, the great
scientist and heroic surgical pioneer Roy Calne made me recognize how rapidly
and radically medical research had changed and become corrupted during the
decades of his career.

Crick,
Francis (1916-2004)

Although
I was aware of him from my mid-teens, it was after 1994 when I embarked on a career
change as a theoretical scientist, that I regarded Francis Crick as a spiritual
mentor and model. I was particularly influenced by his autobiography What
mad pursuit (1988).

Gregory
Clark

Economic
historian, University of California at Davis. Very few books have had such
impact on my thinking as A farewell to alms: a brief economic history of the
world. I didn’t really believe that there was anyone alive capable of such
large scale thinking; and I later had the good fortune to meet Clark and have several
in-depth discussions.

Einstein,
Albert (1879-1955)

Naturally, Einstein always had for me god-like
status as the pinnacle of modern scientific achievement and living – and I have
read innumerable biographies and memoirs – however it all began with an
autobiographical essay in a multi-author volume called I believe: the
personal philosophies of twenty-three eminent men and women of our time (1940)
that I found on our bookshelves at home, in a wartime edition.

Feynman,
Richard (1918-1988)

Feynman
was a later influence on me – probably from around 1988; as a representative of
uncompromising, fearless honesty and scientific integrity yet without
(apparently) any trace of transcendental belief. Like Einstein, Feynman was
raised as a Jew but became very much a modern ‘liberated’ man. Yet, it is not
possible consistently to use Feynman as a mentor, since his personal decision
to be utterly truthful had no deeper rationale, and has no traction in the
corruptly dishonest world of modern research. Feynman got away with truthfulness
for a long time, due to his personal charm, terrifying brilliance and Nobel
Prize – but I now see him as one of the last of a transitional generation of
religious converts to non-nihilistic atheism, after which careerism and
full-nihilism took-over completely.

Hannam,
James

A
popular book by Hannam called God’s philosophers (2010) – although not a
great book – effectively hammered-home for me the substantial and undeniable
achievements of medieval science – that is, of science before there was such a
thing as ‘science’.

Healy,
David

Since
I read his Suspended Revolution (1991) I have avidly been reading the
work of David Healy, and his books on the history, sociology and practice of
psychiatry, psychopharmacology and medicine generally – including his detailed
and conclusive documentation of the thorough corruption of research and
practice especially since the mid-1960s. In my estimation, Healy is
incomparably the greatest writer on these topics in the English language, and
it has been a privilege to know him as a friend and (in a small way) as a
collaborator.

Hesse,
Herman (1877-1962)

Hesse
was author of The Glass Bead Game (1943) also known as Magister Ludi
and DasGlasperlenspiel. This is a memorable account of the
fascination of formal intellectual activity for its own sake, as an utterly
absorbing ‘game’ – cut-off from the real world, from usefulness, from practical
applications.

Horrobin,
David L (1939-2003)

David
Horrobin founded Medical Hypotheses on Popperian principles, and
bequeathed the journal’s editorship to me. He was one of the last classic
scientists to succeed in medical research – and in order to do so he needed to
leave the conventional academic structure and self-fund via his business
activities in pharmacology (and also become the object of extraordinary
resentment). Horrobin was the first to notice and document that the rate of
clinical innovation had declined since the mid 1960s - Horrobin, D.F.
Scientific medicine - success or failure? In: Weatherall, D.J.; Ledingham,
J.G.G.; Warrell, D.A. (Eds.) Oxford Textbook of Medicine, 2nd Edn.
Oxford University Press, Oxford. 1987: 2.1-2.3.

Hull,
David L. (1935-2010)

Hull’s
great work Science as a process (1988) ingeniously uses the theory of
evolution as its example of how science can be conceptualized as a process of
evolution by natural selection – with science regarded in terms of the
replication of theories and professional status as the main evaluation. Hull’s empirically-dense
account seems true of classic or ‘real’ science – and he therefore assumed that
scientific status was constrained by reality. However since Hull’s
explanatory model has no reference to transcendental truth (real reality) as a
regulatory ideal; the evolutionary concept of science turns-out to be equally
true of generic professional research of all types – including ‘zombie’
science. I knew Hull somewhat, having met and corresponded with him – and he
was on the Medical Hypotheses editorial board; and my impression was
that in late life he recognized with considerable dismay that science had
(since the period described in his main book) undergone a ‘turn’ and evolved
away from a concern with the real world and into autonomous careerism.

I
came across the work of Popper in my late teens via the book of that title by
Bryan Magee (1973) – I went on to read some of Popper’s own work, and
particularly liked his autobiography Unended Quest (1977 edition).
Popper’s normative description has been vastly influential in British science,
and it is still used to tell undergraduates how to structure their
investigations. It was also the major influence on the founding by David L
Horrobin of Medical Hypotheses,the theoretical journal I edited from 2003-2010 – Popper had indeed
been a member of the editorial advisory board from about 1974 until his death.
Yet, for all the lip service paid to Popper, it is clear that his ideas have zero
real influence on modern mainstream science; probably because Popper, like most
other philosophers of science, tried to describe science purely in terms of its
process and pragmatic value to the happiness and comfort of society; and
without regard to its transcendental aims.

Rees,
Jonathan

Professor
of Dermatology, University of Edinburgh – previously at Newcastle University.
For many years, at varying intervals, I have met and talked with Jonathan about
science and medicine in broad and specific terms. Despite considerable
professional success, he has - so far as I can tell - remained completely
honest.

Romer,
Paul

I
got the (mistaken) perspective of ‘economic growth fuelling science fuelling
economic growth’ from an audio interview with Romer on econtalk.org dated 27
August 2007. Indeed, I had co-argued something similar myself (with Peter
Andras) in a book called The Modernization Imperative (2003).

Watson,
James D

I
read Watson’s The Double Helix about 1975-ish and have re-read it many
times since; and also enjoyed numerous other accounts of the discovery of the
structure of DNA – especially the 1987 TV movie Life Story. Also
influential more recently was the essay: J. Watson, Succeeding in science: some
rules of thumb, Science 1993; 261: 1812.

Ziman,
John (1925-2005)

Ziman’s
early books such as Public Knowledge (1968) and Reliable Knowledge (1978) were
historical and sociological descriptions of classic science of the golden age;
but Ziman really distinguished himself by being (so far as I know) the first thoroughly
to document the death of classic science in Real Science, published in
2000. Here he described the transformation of ‘academic’ science into
‘post-academic’ science. In this book I have re-named Ziman’s academic science
as ‘real’ science and his ‘post-academic’ science as ‘professional research’. I
knew Ziman slightly when he was on the editorial board of Medical Hypotheses,
and am pleased to dedicate this book to his memory.

Biographical note

Bruce G Charlton is Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at
the University of Buckingham and Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle
University. Bruce has an unusually broad intellectual experience: he graduated
with honours from the Newcastle Medical School, took a doctorate at the Medical
Research Council Neuroendocrinology group, and did postgraduate training in
psychiatry and public health. He has held university lectureships in
physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, and psychology; and has a Masters degree in
English Literature from Durham. From 2003-10 Professor Charlton solo-edited Medical
Hypotheses; a monthly international journal that published frequently
speculative, sometimes amusing, and often controversial ideas and theories
across the whole of medicine and beyond. He has published considerably more
than two hundred scientific papers and academic essays in these fields, and
contributed journalism to UK national broadsheets and weekly magazines. Bruce G
Charlton is author of Thought Prison: the fundamental nature of political
correctness (University of Buckingham Press, 2011).